


Phantasmagoria: Tales of Horror

by normancrane



Category: Original Work
Genre: Africa, Apocalypse, Body Horror, Bullying, Creepy, Creepypasta, Horror, Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Monsters, One Shot Collection, Original Fiction, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Apocalypse, Psychological Horror, References to Lovecraft, Revenge, Scary, Short, Shorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:08:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 47
Words: 63,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29252718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/normancrane/pseuds/normancrane
Summary: A collection of horror stories ranging from the Gothic to the cosmic, and beyond.





	1. Foreword

Within you will find scary stories written at different times for different reasons.

Enter at your own risk.

Beware insanity.

Please don't feed the skeletons.


	2. The Boy Who Spoke Mosquito

Once in third grade they held Duey Pepper's head inside a terrarium for seven minutes while Mr Winters went out for a cigarette. The yellow snake hissed and slithered and looped itself around Duey's neck as everyone sat silent and watched. When Mr Winters came back Linda Martins put up her hand and answered a question about the geography of the United States. Duey didn't put up his hand. Duey never put up his hand. Duey never talked except to Oliver, though no one ever heard them. Oliver was Duey's only friend. By fourth grade they started on Oliver, too. I saw it. Pushing and slapping him in a circle, asking him, "What's Duey sound like, I bet he says he loves you, does he talk like a fag?"

Duey didn't have parents. He had grandparents. They were from somewhere else and didn't speak English. In the spring they planted rows of tomatoes and gave Duey sandwiches with horseradish that smelled across the cafeteria. Once in fifth grade the other kids held Duey down on a long plastic table and pressed the horseradish into his face. He didn't say a word. He just took it. His eyes got real red but he didn't rub them, and he didn't cry. One of the teachers saw. In the teachers' lounge she said "boys will be boys," and drank coffee. Duey's grandparents didn't complain to the school board. They didn't speak English. And Duey didn't have parents.

Before that fall, no one ever took Duey Pepper's picture. It wasn't like it is now, with all the news people around, pointing their black lenses and eating city lunches. Sometimes at recess the bolder ones climb fences and set off flashes while the kids play footy on the cement. Goal after goal and all they probably hope for is that it happens again. Those pale bloodless young bodies. Duey doesn't play footy. Sometimes they put his picture in the paper all the same, with no story or caption. Just a boy's picture. A boy by himself, standing. A boy just like any other boy except for the stitches across his mouth.

But just watch as Duey gets too close and they scatter like frightened seagulls. Everyone's afraid of Duey now. Not everyone scatters.

If Oliver was alive, Oliver wouldn't scatter. He'd write to Duey in a secret notebook and Duey would write back and they would stand beside each other at recess while the other kids played footy. In the newspaper they wrote under one of the pictures that Duey can't smile because of the stitches, but that's not true. Duey can smile if he wants to. If Oliver was still alive, Duey would want to smile sometimes. If he read something nice or funny in the notebook. In the newspaper they also wrote that Duey's grandparents aren't there anymore and that Duey lives alone. That's a lie, too. The tomato plants are still planted in the spring. Everyone knows Duey's too young to plant tomatoes.

During the trial when Duey spoke they left a camera in the room and no one else because they were so scared. The judge and the lawyers and the jury and the rest of them. It was just one boy and a camera. They say you can't see anything on the recording, just a black cloud, but I don't know if that's true. You can hear Duey talk. They played part of it on the television. He must have taken off his stiches. It was Duey's decision to put the stitches in, most people don't realize that. He did it himself. But he carries a knife, too. A little pocket knife that's just sharp enough to cut through the thread. He must have had it at the trial when they left him alone with the camera. He must have cut through and spoke.

Duey talked about how the boys took him to the bathroom, about how they punched him and held him down and called him names. Duey's voice stopped sometimes. He said the blood tasted like horseradish. He said there were five but he didn't say their names. Donny Nelson and Augustino were there for sure. I saw through the window. Nobody knows, but I saw them hit Duey. I saw Duey hit them back. The blood looked like tomato juice and Duey said it tasted like horseradish. It was on his eye and around his lips. Donny Nelson hit him hard and they all said bad things. Duey fell and he didn't move anymore. But Donny Nelson said bad things and Augustino was bleeding, too, and he grabbed Duey by the sweater and dragged him into one of the stalls. Donny Nelson kicked Duey in the head. Augustino spit blood. Then they picked Duey up by the hair and they hit his face against the toilet. It was loud and Duey's teeth were all on the floor. Duey was bleeding. Duey wasn't moving. Augustino was laughing and they left Duey there.

The window was open and I flew in when it was quiet. I landed on Duey's soft brown hair. I walked across Duey's forehead and down his twitching eyelids. Blood was dripping from his nose but I didn't try any. The breath from his nostrils pushed against my wings. His lips were moving and inside all the teeth were broken. There was a lot of blood in his mouth. It was open. I flew in and sat on his tongue. I pricked the flesh and took a drink. The blood tasted good, the tongue was warm. I called the others and they came. So many came in through the window like the darkest fog until the room was night. All were swarming and settling around Duey's face. On the tongue, inside the ears, behind the eyes, up the nostrils and flying under the skull, around the brain. Through the throat to the lungs and swimming down arteries to the very beating heart. Buzzing, we feasted. Fed, we stayed.

The ambulance siren wailed.

"You shouldn't have done it to Oliver," Duey said on the tape. Everyone was watching on television. They'd hanged Oliver on a coat hook. This was before. Donny Nelson and Augustino and the other boys. It was an accident, the school board said, but Oliver couldn't breathe and he flailed his legs until he suffocated. The janitor found his body in the morning. Nobody asked why they didn't take him down. Nobody asked why they'd hanged him up. It was an accident, the school board said and Oliver's mom cried loudest at the funeral.

Months later when Duey came back to school everyone left him alone. Even the teachers left him alone. His teeth were fixed but all the new parts were a different colour and they looked jagged like a shark.

Once in seventh grade Duey Pepper put up his hand. It was afternoon and Mr Winters was talking about the capitals of Asia. Linda Martins was there and Donny Nelson and Augustino and the others. Duey Pepper put up his hand, Mr Winters asked, "Yes?" but when Duey opened his mouth instead of the sound of any word it was we that came out. A trickle into a string, into a neverending black buzzing ribbon that wound itself around every tender neck until not one more gasp was heard. Suffocation and punctuation and frozen terror in their eyes. Outside, the first graders played on the grass, across the hall, the fourth graders learned the basics of civil responsibility, and we filled throats and eyes and sucked out seventh grade blood until not a drop was left. Fattened, we returned to our host.

When the bell rang, the classroom door stayed shut. Minutes passed. Duey sat in his seat. Someone finally knocked. Finally, a teacher opened the door. And she saw. Then they all saw. Those pale bloodless young bodies. And Duey, in the back row, alive and innocent, with a closed, quivering, peaceful mouth—smiling.

Now the news people are always around. Every day they eat lunches and wait, climbing fences and setting off flashes at footy games. Sometimes they take pictures of the boy standing alone with stitches across his mouth. The vampire boy, the butcher boy, the bloodletter. Duey has no friends and doesn't smile, but no one teases him anymore and nobody says bad things. At lunch, he eats sandwiches with horseradish that smell across the cafeteria. He never puts up his hand and he never talks.

When he gets too close, the news people scatter like seagulls.


	3. Terminus

I found the two-headed baby deer dying on a bed of soft pine needles under cover of an overturned oak not five kilometres from my cottage. Its lungs still pumped, and its crimson heart beat weakly through a thin, translucent skin that decayed before my eyes until there was no skin and all the organs lay warm and still in a heap upon the earth like waste.

A god evaporated.

It is human nature to disbelieve that one may be witness to epochal events, so I did not believe that I, of all people, should be witness to the death of time.

Epochal: the concept itself is dead.

How lucky we were to know time at its cleanest and most linear!

We know now that such constant linearity was the consequence of a living entity. It followed the creature like stench follows a skunk, and we basked in it as if it was the natural state of the world.

No more.

Time no longer heals. Things do not pass, or pass only to return.

At first we believed this would be manageable. Yes, we thought, we will relive our pain but also our love. _Everything_ shall be magnified! Welcome to an age of great emotions, a new Romanticism!

Yet we overestimated how much we help. We failed to accept how much we hurt.

And we did not realize the nature of evil, which accumulates in a way love does not. To re-experience our love is to know it again and again at the same intensity, but to re-experience pain is to increase its volume until it overpowers us, deafening us to everything else.

I will never forget the creature's eyes, full of hatred or hubris yet seeking aid it knew I could not give.

How does one save a dying god?

It was not my fault!

I was but a child asked suddenly to solve a deathbed equation expressed in an undiscovered mathematics. I had to fail, yet in failing I have brought it all upon us.

I relive it constantly.

Every time its eyes are louder.

But it is the hour for my afternoon walk, so I will take a pause and enjoy what remains of living.

I will go to my favourite spot overlooking the city and sit on the iron bench, from where the view is magnificent. Above me, the clouds will form, a tangle of pain and human corpses, and I will sit and ponder until the first blood drops fall. Then the screaming will begin and the final storm will rage. Beating, crimson corpse-clouds under a thin skin of dissipating reality, raining blood until we are left warm and still upon the earth…


	4. The Fertile Earth

The foam began washing up on our shores two years ago. At first, it was sparse, resembled barely beaten egg whites, and most of us paid it scant attention. Because it posed no immediate threat, we relegated it to "scientific interest." Over time, however, as it persisted, flowed and thickened into the consistency of properly steamed cappuccino froth, stories started appearing in the news: online, then on television. We traced its origins to deep within the Marianas Trench. But foam is boring, even as it subtly changes hue from ghostly white to green tea. Thus the first images of the foam most of us remember were mechanical, of urban plows pushing it back into the sea. That worked, for a while. But the foam inevitably returned, subtly thicker, greener and more expansive than before. By the time the plows ceased their effectiveness, we had already identified the asteroid ("Isaacasimov") but had not yet made the connection. The foam, albeit having covered much of our coastline, remained more of a nuisance than a threat, for it _did_ nothing. As Earth worked to track the asteroid, then scrambled to destroy it, the foam crept silently inland. As you may be able to deduce, we were successful in neutralizing the asteroid. The world watched united as our international mission broke the asteroid apart and diverted its larger chunks safely away from our planet. We expected the atmosphere to deal with the resulting debris, to watch the pieces burn as they descended, but our expectations proved incorrect. Instead of a display of shooting stars we witnessed a rain of cosmic dust. The atmosphere proved porous. Most grains fell upon the dry earth, but some landed in the now luminous green foam. Protected, they sprouted as seeds. Fertilized, they grew. There was an elegance to it: ancient nutrients from deep within the Earth and life from outer space. The resulting organisms, alien in the true sense of the word, were impervious to our weapons and excreted tiny spore-like particles as they matured. Within weeks, our skies were so polluted we could barely see the sun. We choked, and our immune systems reacted: we began foaming. Like our planet, our bodies betrayed us, and the particles took up residence in our moist and fertile viscera. They fed on us to breed. Once infected, an individual had only days left, but as a species we adapted, segregated and furiously engineered. I am one of the final survivors and personally witnessed the completion of the wormhole generator, via which I shall within the hour send this, my final communique, into an unknown past. Or should I say _your present_. But I, too, am foaming now, and my fate has already been sealed. I am by nature a pessimist, but if my pessimism is misplaced, heed my warning: Beware the foam!


	5. The Salt Hollows

During funerals I often imagine I am a salt shaker. The salt shaker is empty and someone is shaking it, but, because it is empty, no salt falls out. There’s a meal under the shaker: fried liver with onions. Because no salt falls out, because the shaker is empty, the meal tastes plain. The person eating is disappointed. He curses his luck and blames others. Sometimes he gets angry. Sometimes the angry man is me. It’s an impossibility that my therapist says is significant; but I pay my therapist. If I stopped paying, she’d stop saying I am significant. I know it’s an impossibility to be a salt shaker in the first place.

I sleep well after funerals. The sleep is deep. Someone finally shakes me awake, but at least once I’ve been thought dead. It made my mother cry. When I came downstairs for breakfast she didn’t recognize me. I’m glad my mother is alive. She’s the last of us, but she’s in her eighties and will die soon, too. At her funeral I will imagine I am a salt shaker and afterward I will sleep long and well.

In my physical life I don’t like salt. It is unhealthy and its taste overpowers. In your eyes it stings. When I was a girl, salt was expensive even though we lived near a salt mine. The mine was famous and tourists came on buses. The buses were black and yellow like the mine workers. The tourists gave us candy. I much prefer sugar to salt. Sweetness complements though it, too, is unhealthy. Salt comes from the underground, which is close to Hell. Sugar can be the product of bees, which are animals like humans, who are sinful but can ascend to Heaven. When I was a girl I liked to lie on the grass and trace the paths of bees with my finger. If one landed on my stomach I let it walk and tickle me all over.

My mother lived with a man named Henry. Henry wasn’t my father but that’s what I called him and when I did my mother smiled and gave us both hugs. Henry died eleven years ago. He was a salesman and my mother loved him. For a long time I thought Henry was my real father. When I knew the truth, I told and it made my mother cry and Henry mad. Henry called the police and my mother hit herself until her fists turned red. I wasn’t to sleep in my bedroom after that. The truth was that my real father worked in the salt mine. I don’t know his name but for one summer he came every night to visit me through a window. After the truth my mother hit me, too. And the policeman asked me serious questions.

One day Henry and the policeman drove in the police car to the salt mine. The road was dusty and I saw the rising dust from my bedroom window even though I wasn’t allowed there anymore. The newspaper wrote that my father didn’t come out. It wrote that the manager of the mine let out all the workers but my father stayed underground and when the police went in with their pistols they found my father dead. I know because the newspaper has an archive. When I was older I went there. The mine closed soon after that. The buses stopped coming. There was no more candy.

That was August. In November I am sent twice a week to a schoolmate’s house overnight. My schoolmate’s mother looks at me and tells me that I of all people should understand. Everyone treats me differently. I hate going there. Sometimes I run away home and sleep in Henry’s storeroom. He stores tools and car parts and also blankets, with which I wrap myself to keep warm. The storeroom has two windows: one faces home, the other the forest. There’s an old tree close to the second window and when the wind picks up the branches hit against the glass. The sound wakes me. Winter has come early. There’s a storm. Through the window facing home, I see light in my mother and Henry’s bedroom. Henry is on business. My mother must be worried. I don’t like when she worries, so I hope the weather is not dangerous. I go to the second window. Outside, the world is white but I see three shapes. Two are standing. One is the policeman, another is Henry.

Henry is holding a pistol and his hand is shaking. There’s a third shape under the pistol. The third shape is thin and on its knees and is chained to the trunk of the tree whose branches rattle against the storeroom window. The third shape is barely moving and I can’t tell if it is the shape or wind that howls. Henry puts the pistol close to the third shape’s head and fires. I barely hear the sound but see the third shape stretch, then fall, limp, onto the fresh snow. The policeman pats Henry on the back and Henry gives the pistol to the policeman. They turn and I fall away from the window, scared. I shouldn’t be here, I remember. I should be at my schoolmate’s house.

I wrap myself in Henry’s blankets but the blankets are cold and the cold makes the fear worse and I suddenly imagine all of them standing in front of me—all four of them: Henry, my mother, the policeman and my father. They are silent but breathing yet no steam comes out of their nostrils. Instead, they spew salt. The salt flows out of their ears and over their eyes, which turn pink, and from under their fingernails, which fall off, and the salt is bloody. It stings them and hurts them and even before they fall apart like dolls I know it is eating them from the inside like corrosion. I imagine that all the salt the miners ever took out of the mine is in their bodies, so that when it is done and they are broken, all I see are four thin shells filled with salt. But I also know that that is an impossibility, so they are people, too, and they put each other back together, but now that I’ve seen their salt I know they are nothing but painful containers.

When the sun comes up the body is gone. I wait until nine, then pretend I have returned from my schoolmate’s house. My mother is nervous and Henry is not feeling well, so my mother suggests I spend the day outside playing. She helps me put on a coat and hat. The sun melts the snow and the ground turns softer. My shoes get muddy so I play in the forest where the ground is harder and the snow persists. Between the roots of trees I find an injured bee. Maybe it was surprised by the snowstorm. I reach down to help it, at least to touch it and help it feel loved, but it stings me. I run home where my mother rubs cold alcohol on the swelling. She says that once a bee stings someone it dies but I don’t know if that’s true or just a fairy tale.


	6. The Pyramid at the End of the Street

I lived with my parents on a suburban street ending in a cul-de-sac. Our neighbour, Mr Maxwell, was a widower who brought us home baked pies and helped my sister with her math homework. My high school crush, Natalia, lived in a brick bungalow three houses down. On Sundays we all went to church, and twice a month during the summer there was a street-wide BBQ. In the winters the kids went sledding on a nearby hill. Growing up, I considered it boring. Looking back, it was paradise.

The Abaroas moved in in November. From the beginning it was obvious they were different. They didn't attend our church or make small talk by the community mailbox. Instead, they smiled and spoke about their own faith, Aknaism. "Buddhist and Maya thought is connected," Mr Abaroa once told me, "because the Maya crossed the Pacific and colonized Asia."

Although they were never aggressive in their proselytizing, it was their one topic of conversation, and we quickly learned to avoid them altogether. However, this didn't seem to faze them, and many of us recalled their polite but ominous refrain: "Unfortunate, but you will soon see the truth."

Those words echoed in my head when on a particularly dark February night the pyramid appeared at the end of the street.

It was ethereal, an effervescent volume of red mist, and one by one we came out of our houses to gaze upon its impossible appearance until every house was empty and the street was filled with silent awe.

The pyramid pulled us toward itself.

And like human ice breaking from a glacier, individually we went, freeing ourselves from the loving grips of our neighbours and families. 

I watched as Mr Maxwell drifted toward the pyramid and disappeared into it.

Then it took me.

Despite its tangible exterior dimensions, the pyramid was infinitely vast on the inside. Its crimson redness pulsed, and space itself hummed, and from the hum emanated the voice of Mr Abaroa. "Welcome, Norman. Tonight you shall know enlightenment."

I fell.

On impact, I arose and saw before me an axe and the kneeling, crying figure of Mr Maxwell.

"Don't," he sobbed.

Bloody spray adorned his face.

"Take the axe," instructed Mr Abaroa. "This is your destiny."

I hesitated.

Mr Maxwell cried hysterically. His hands were bloody too.

"Understand, Norman. Everything up to now: it has been for you. _All life has been for you._ "

My heart pumped hotly. I picked up the axe. 

"You are the one."

And somewhere deep inside I knew he was right. I _was_ special. Mr Maxwell raised his eyes to look at me—

I crushed his skull.

His body crumpled. His blood painted my face, and I fell to my knees, tossing the axe aside. I had done it!

Mr Maxwell's body disappeared.

Natalia landed in front of me.

Our eyes met.

"Take the axe," Mr Abaroa instructed her out of the hum. " _This is your destiny. All life has been for you._ "

"Don't," I sobbed.


	7. Seedhead

Even among my more troubled patients, Richter was unique. The level to which he was disturbed without any known cause or stimulus was unprecedented, and so I considered him my prized patient, the broken mind upon which I would sail to psychological stardom. This was even before I personally witnessed him bloom and unseed.

The primary cause of Richter's psychosis was nightmares. He experienced them constantly, cyclically and, when they reached their inevitable crescendo, with such completeness that to describe them as his counter-reality would be an injustice to his terror. They were hyper-reality, more real than the everyday world for you or I.

Each nightmare gripped him for weeks, first whenever he slept but soon creeping into his waking life, so that he had no respite. Indeed, the nightmares gained power over time, adapting to his emotions and evolving to maximize their own atrocity, until they attained peak horror and released him, never to return.

Sometimes a few peaceful days would subsequently pass, but even those were stained with the dread of a new nightmare to come.

However, it is this act of peaking, which I shall in my professional capacity call the bloom, and which I first witnessed two months ago, that has shaken me to the core, not only as a psychologist but as a human being.

I witnessed the following through a secret window in a clinical room mocked up to resemble Richter's bedchamber:

After suffering several hours of unrelenting mental anguish manifesting itself almost grotesquely in the physical realm as perspiration, tremors, self-mutilation and incomprehensible muttering, Richter falls suddenly to sleep.

The slumber, which to my observations appears deep, lasts two hours and thirty-four minutes.

It ends abruptly as Richter leaps to his feet, tears off his clothing, digs his nails into the top of his scalp, and proceeds, in much the same brutal manner, to tear the skin off his skull.

His screams are unbearable, although it is unclear whether they are the result of mental pain or the physical pain of his auto-deskinning.

Once his skull is exposed, he proceeds to tear the skin off his face, which, in the most unbelievable way resembles less human bone and musculature than the petals of a bloody dandelion.

No longer veiled by skin, this face-flower achieves a gloriously yellow colour and _blooms_ before my eyes!

One madness of flora and fauna!

But swiftly, as the screams intensify, the flower begins to wilt, the hanging veils of skin climb his face, enclosing it—

Before bursting forth to reveal a spherical seed head.

As a wind of screams rages within the chamber, breaking the blowball and dispersing its multitude of nightmare seeds, reality ripples.

Finally the wind subsists, silence returns, and Richter stands: an immobile, headless body.

The veils of skin form an orb above his neck, he falls, and when he awakens in the morning his head has been biologically re-created. His memories of the entire incident are faint, fading…

The entire process leaves no visible scars and no physical evidence.

Thus my hypothesis: Richter is not only man, but an organic manifestation of the nightmare impulse, a sentient host for a parasitic nightmare laboratory whose creations are perfected in his mind before being disseminated into humanity at large. The nightmares we experience, often dulled as if through a fog, Richter has already experienced countless times at an impossible clarity.

Whether he is the only one of his kind I cannot say.

In the coming weeks, I must complete my written study and submit it for peer review. I predict it will revolutionize the field of psychology, the understanding of the mind and introduce finally the notion of horror as a living entity: an incubus among us.


	8. Don Whitman's Masterpiece

It was Danvers who finally pushed him in. We’d been feeding the fire with hardwood since the afternoon and it had gotten big as the wind picked up by nightfall, flickering cross our faces and warming our cheeks better than a gas heater. He didn’t even scream when he fell. The flames just swallowed him up—sparks shooting out like hot vomit. He knew what he’d done. He knew it was wrong. When he lifted himself up and came out of the fire he stood dead still, staring at us, smiling like we’d done him a favour. Maybe he thought he deserved to turn into ash. Maybe he did deserve it. I know I kept my fingers tight round the handle of the axe just the same till he keeled over and Cauley had touched the corpse with his foot and we knew he was dead. The three of us, we kept silent for a long while after that. There was just the sound of wood burning and it was better that way. None of us touched the body but none of us looked away, either: you could still make out his face, unmistakable, when the rest of him was dark and formless. He was a face on a pile. Then the wind started taking bits and pieces and carrying them away. Like I told the police, he didn’t touch me, but I knew some of the kids he’d done it to. He’d done it to Danvers. I remember once when all the other kids were gone, I’d stayed after class, Mr Gregor bent himself close to my ear and told me the real story. “You’re a wicked one,” he said when he was done, “just like Don Whitman.”

They used to scare us with Don Whitman, the adults: the other teachers, our parents, the priest. But no one ever explained it. They’d just say, “You better do what we want or else Don Whitman will come back and get you.” Mr Gregor was the only one ever to tell it to me with details. He told it different, too. He said he remembered because he was the same age as Don Whitman and they went to the same school. He said that what the others say they remember is like Cain and Abel or Little Red Riding Hood. Even the landscape tells the fairy tale. After it happened, Don Whitman’s school got torn down, then his house. And the bells in the Church got changed: the ones they rang after Elizabeth Cartwell had come back hysterical with the news.

You can’t tear down or change a man’s memory, Mr Gregor told me.

Once you see, it’s forever.

Elizabeth Cartwell’s parents moved away as soon as the police investigation finished. A lot of people moved away. But Mr Gregor showed me a newspaper from Hill City, North Dakota from some years later. The paper was yellow but you could read the black print fine. The story was about a girl who’d killed herself. The photo was of Elizabeth Cartwell. As he held it out for me to see, his hand shook and I felt his breath grow warmer against the skin around my neck. Nothing made him shake as much as what happened to Elizabeth Cartwell, not even the details.

Don Whitman was seventeen when he did it. He was handsome, with wide shoulders and played football. All the girls liked him. He was going to go to college. Maybe that’s why they thought he was ready: they thought he was a man. They thought he’d be with them. It was a school night when they woke him and drove out to the old pumping station, so that he could see everything for himself. They wanted to make him a part of it just like they were. If he saw, he would want it just like they did. I was always told that he drove out there by himself, but Mr Gregor told me that’s part of the lie. He said Don Whitman’s father was in the car with the mayor and the chief of police. He said, “How would he have found the place by himself—why would he have gone looking?”

The place is in a wood not far from the border. Of course, the whole underground is filled with cement now, but you can still see where the opening used to be: a fat tube sticking out of the ground, just big enough for a man to crawl down into. There was a hatch on it then, and thick locks. The hatch was sound-proof. If you stood right beside it, you couldn’t hear a thing, but as soon as you opened the hatch you could smell the insides and hear the moans start to drift upwards into the world. A steel ladder led down. Mr Gregor says they all knew about it, everyone: all the adults. They’d all been down that ladder. All of them had seen it.

Don Whitman went down the ladder, too. He must have smelled the insides grow stronger and heard the moaning echo louder with every rung but he kept going. On the ground above, his father spoke to the mayor and they both felt proud. Don Whitman must have been more scared of coming up and disappointing them than of not going down to the limit. But when he reached the bottom, the very bottom, and put his feet to the hard concrete and saw it before his own eyes, something inside of him must have broken—

“They sugarcoat it and they make a child’s game of it because they’re too scared to remember the truth,” Mr Gregor told me. “They can’t forget it, but it’s a stain to them, so they cover it up and pretend that everything’s clean.”

Don Whitman saw the vastness of the interlocking chambers and, within them, the writhing, ecstatic, swollen no-people of the underground, human-like but non-human, cross-bred mammals draped in plaster-white skin pinned to numb faces, men, women and children, male and female, naked, scared, dirty, with humans—humans Don Whitman knew and recognized—among them, on them and under them, hitting them, squeezing them, making them hurt, making monstrous sounds with them, all under slowly rotating heat lamps, all open and together, one before another, and then someone, someone Don Whitman knew, must have put a hand on Don Whitman’s shoulder and Don Whitman would have asked, “But what now, what am I supposed to do?” and then, from somewhere deep within the chambers, from a place not even Don Whitman would ever see, a voice answered:

“Anything.”

Mr Gregor pulled away from me and I felt my body turn cold. Icy sweat crawled under my collar and below my thighs.

I’d been told Don Whitman had found the old pumping station and lured the police to it, that they’d called others—including Don Whitman’s father—to talk him out of any violence, but that he’d snapped and murdered them all without firing a single shot, with his bare hands, and dumped the bodies into the metal pipe sticking out of the ground, the one just wide enough for a man to fit through. Then he’d disappeared. It wasn’t until days later that Elizabeth Cartwell found the bodies and there was never any sign of Don Whitman after that. The manhunt failed. So the church bells rang, the school was torn down, the pipe was filled in and, ever since, the adults scare their children with the story of the high school boy who’d done a terrible, sinful thing and vanished into thin air.

“And why would she decide to go out there?” Mr Gregor asked—meaning Elizabeth Cartwell—his eyes dead-set through a window at the raining world outside. “It’s as transparent as a sheet of the Bible, every word of it. They all pretend to believe because they’ve all made it up together. But the police reports, the testimony, the news stories, the court records, the verdict: a sham, a falsification made truth because a thousand people and a judge repeat it, word-for-word, every night before bed.”

I tried to stand but couldn’t. My heart was pounding me back into the chair. I was thinking about my mother and father. I had only enough courage for one question, so I asked, “What happened to the no-people?”

Mr Gregor turned suddenly and laughed so fierce the rain lashed the windows even harder. He came toward me. He put a delicate hand on each of my shoulders. He bent forward until his lips were almost touching mine and, his eyes staring at me like one stares at the Devil, said:

“Buried in the concrete. Buried alive, buried dead—”

I pushed him away.

He stumbled backward without losing his balance.

I forced myself off the chair, praying that my legs would keep. My knees shook but held. In front of me, Mr Gregor rasped for air. A few long strands of his thin hair had fallen across his forehead. He was sweating.

“He was a coward, that little boy, Don Whitman. Without him, we wouldn’t need to live under the whip of elaborate lies designed by weaker people turned away and shamed by the power of the natural order of things. They trusted him, and he betrayed us all. The fools! The weakling! Imagine,” Mr Gregor hissed, “just imagine what we could have had, what we could have experienced down there, at the very bottom, in the chambers...”

His eyes spun and his chest heaved as he grew excited, but soon he lost his venom and his voice returned to normal.

Finally, he said without any nastiness, “You’re a wicked one, just like Don Whitman.”

And I ran out.

Danvers prodded me awake. I must have fallen asleep during the night because when I opened my eyes it was morning already. The sun was up and the flames gone, but the fire was still warm. Mr Gregor’s dead face still rested atop a pile of ashes. Cauley was asleep on the dirt across from us. I could tell Danvers hadn’t slept at all. He said he’d been to a farmhouse and called the police. We woke up Cauley and talked over what we’d say when they got here. We decided on something close to the truth: Mr Gregor had taken the three of us camping and, when he tried to do a bad thing, we put up a fight and knocked him into the flames. Cauley said it might be suspicious because of how easily Mr Gregor had burned, but Danvers said that some people were like that—they burned quick and whole—so we needn’t say a word about the gasoline. When the police came, they were professional and treated us fair, but when they took me aside to talk to me about the accident, every time I tried to tell them about the bad things Mr Gregor had done, they wouldn’t hear it, they just said it was a shame there’d been an accident and someone had died.

At home, I asked my parents whether Mr Gregor was a bad person for what he’d done to Danvers and others. My mother didn’t say anything. My father looked at me like he was looking at the Devil himself and said morality was not so simple and that people had differing points of view and that, in the end, much depended not on what you did, but who you did it to—like during the war, for example. There were some who deserved to be done-to and others whose privilege it was to do. Then he picked up his magazine and told me it was best not to think about such things at all.

I did keep thinking about them, and about Don Whitman, too. When I got to high school, I was too old to scare with monsters, but once in a while I’d hear one of the adults tell a kid he better do as he’d been told or Don Whitman would come back and get him. I wondered if maybe people scare others with monsters they’re most scared of themselves. I even thought about investigating: taking a pick-axe to the pumping station and cracking through concrete or investigating records of how much of it had been poured in there. But I figured the records could have been fixed and one person with a pick-axe wouldn’t get far before the police came and I didn’t trust them anymore. I also had homework to worry about and I started seeing a girl.

I’d almost forgotten about Don Whitman by the time my mother sent me out one evening with my dad’s rifle to hunt down a coyote she said had been attacking her hens. I took a bike, because it was quiet, and was roaming just beyond town when I saw something kick up dust in a field. I shot at it, missed and it scurried off. I pedaled after it until it seemingly disappeared into nowhere. I kept my eye firm on the spot I saw it last and when I got close enough, I saw there was a small hole in the ground there. I stuck the rifle in and the hole felt bigger on the inside, so I stomped all around till the hole caved and where there’d been a mouse-sized hole now there was an opening a grown man could fit through. It seemed deep, which made me curious, because there aren’t many caves around here, so I stuck my feet in but still couldn’t feel the bottom. I slid in a little further, and further still, and soon the opening was above my head and I was inside with my whole body.

It was dark but I could feel the ground sloping. When my eyes accustomed to the gloom, I saw enough to tell there was a tunnel leading into the depths and that it was big enough for me to crawl through. I didn’t have a light but I knew it was important to try the hole. Maybe there were no-people at the bottom. Mostly, though, I didn’t think—I expected: that every time I poked ahead with the rifle, I’d hit earth and the tunnel would be done.

That never happened. I descended for hours. The tunnel grew narrower and the slope sharpened. Fear tightened around my chest. I lost track of time. There wasn’t enough space to turn my body around and I’d been descending for so long it was foolish to backtrack. Surely, the tunnel led somewhere. It was not a natural tunnel, I told myself, it must lead somewhere. I should continue until I reached the end, turn around and return to the surface. The trick was to keep calm and keep moving forward.

And I was right. Several hours later the tunnel ended and I crawled out through a hollow in the wall of a huge grotto.

I stood, stretched my limbs and squinted through the dimness. I couldn’t see the other end of the grotto but the wall curved so I thought that maybe if I went along I might get to the other end. My plan of an immediate return to the surface was on hold. I had to see what lived here. Images of no-people raced through my head. I readied my rifle and proceeded, slowly at first. Where the tunnel had been packed dirt and clay, the walls and floor of the grotto were solid rock. There was moisture, too. It flowed down the walls and gathered in depressions on the floor.

Although at first the wall felt smooth, soon I began to feel a texture to it—like a washboard. The ceiling faded into view. The grotto was getting smaller. And the texture was becoming rougher, more violent. I was thinking about the texture and Mr Gregor’s burnt body when a sound sent me sprawling. My elbow banged against the rock and I nearly cried out. My heart was beating like it had beaten me into my chair in the classroom. The sound was real: faint but clear and echoing. It was the sound of continuous and rhythmic scratching.

I crawled forward, holding the rifle in front. The scratching grew louder. I thought about calling out, but suddenly felt foolish to believe in no-people or anything of that kind. It seemed more sensible to believe in large rodents or coyotes with sharp teeth. I could have turned back, but the only thing more frightening than a monster in front is a monster behind, so I pulled myself on.

In fact, I was crawling up a small hill and, when I had reached the top, I looked down and there it was:

His was a human body. Though hunched, he stood on human legs and scratched with human hands. His movements were also clearly a man’s movements. There was nothing feminine about them. His half-translucent skin was grey, almost white, and taut; and if he had any hair, I didn’t see it. His naked body was completely smooth. I looked at him for a long time with dread and disgust. His arms didn’t stop moving. Whatever they were scratching, they kept scratching. Even when he turned and his head looked at me, even as I—stunned—frozen in terror, recoiled against the wall, still his arms kept moving and his hands clawing.

For a few seconds, I thought he’d seen me, that I was done for.

I gripped the rifle tight.

But as I focused on his face, I realized he hadn’t seen me at all. He couldn’t see me. His face, so much like a colourless swollen skull, was punctuated by two black and empty eye sockets.

He turned back to face the wall he was scratching. I turned my face, too. The texture on the wall was his. The deeper the grooves, the newer the work. I put down the rifle and put my hand on the wall, letting my fingers trace the contours of the texture. It wasn’t simple lines. The scratching wasn’t meaningless. These were two words repeated over and over, sometimes on top of each other, sometimes backwards, sometimes small, sometimes each letter as big as a person, and they were all around this vast underground lair, everywhere you looked—

Two words: Don Whitman.

He’d made this grotto. I felt feverish. The sheer greatness, the determination needed to scratch out such a place with one’s bare hands. Or perhaps the insanity—the punishment. If I hadn’t been sitting, a wave of empathy would have knocked me to the wet, rocky floor. I picked up the rifle. I could put Don Whitman out of his misery. I lifted the rifle and pointed it at the distant figure writing his name pointlessly into the wall. With one pull of the trigger, I could show him infinite mercy. I steadied myself. I said a prayer.

Don Whitman stopped scratching and wailed.

I bit down on my teeth.

I hadn’t fired yet.

He grabbed his head and fell to his knees. The high-pitched sound coming from his throat was unbearable. I felt like my mind was being ripped apart. I dropped the rifle and covered my ears. Again, Don Whitman turned. This time with his entire body. He crawled a few steps toward me—still wailing—before stopping and falling silent. He raised his head. Where before had been just eye sockets now there were eyes. White, with irises. Somehow, they’d grown.

He got to his feet and I was sure that he could see me now. He was staring at me. I called his name:

“Don Whitman!”

He didn’t react. Thoughts raced through my mind: what should I do once he comes toward me? Should I defend myself or should I embrace him?

But he didn’t step forward.

He took one step back and lifted his long fingers to his face. His nails, I now saw, were thick and curved as a bird’s talons. He moved them softly from his forehead, down his cheeks and up to his eyes, into which, without warning, he pressed them so painfully that I felt my own eyes burn. When he brought his fingers back out, in each hand he held a mashed and bleeding eyeball. These he put almost greedily into his mouth, one after the other, then chewed, and swallowed.

Having nourished his body, he returned to the wall and began scratching again.

As I watched the movements of his arms, able to follow the pattern of the letters they were carving, I no longer felt like killing him. If he wanted to die, he could die: he could forego water, he could refuse to eat. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to keep scratching his name into the walls of this grotto: Don Whitman, Don Whitman, Don Whitman…

I watched him for a long time before I realized that I would have to get to the surface soon. People would begin to worry. They might start looking for me. And as much as I needed to know the logic behind Don Whitman’s grotto, I also needed food. I couldn’t live down here. I couldn’t eat my own eyes and expect them to grow back. Eventually, I would either have to return to the world above or die.

I put my hand on the grotto wall and began to mentally retrace my steps. A return would not be difficult. All I would need to do was follow—

That’s when I knew.

The geography of it hit me.

The hole I’d entered was on the outskirts of town. The tunnel sloped toward the town. That meant this grotto was below the town. The town hall, the bank, the police station, the school—all of it was lying unknowingly on top of a giant expanding cavity. One day, this cavity would be too large, the town would be too heavy, and everything would collapse into a deep and permanent handmade abyss. Don Whitman would bury the town just as the town had buried the no-people. Everything would be destroyed. Everyone would die. That was Don Whitman’s genius. That was his life’s work.

I picked up the rifle and faced Don Whitman for the final time.

He must have known that I was there. He’d heard me and had probably seen me before he pulled out his eyes, yet he just continued to scratch. Faced with death, he kept working.

As I stood there, I had no doubt that, left in peace, Don Whitman would finish his project. His will was too powerful. The result would be catastrophic. It was under these assumptions that I made the most moral and important decision of my life:

I walked away.


	9. Infestation

"When are you going to leave your wife?" my mistress asked.

I was putting on my boots.

"Soon," I said.

On my way home, I swung by the office to pick up a new golf club I'd had delivered, then stopped by the daycare to pick up my son.

That's when I saw the first wasp.

I assumed it had entered the car on my son's clothes. It was particularly pesky, eluding my attempts to flush it out the windows until I had no choice but to pull over and hunt it down with a rolled-up business magazine—a hunt that ended with a very satisfying _splat_!

The next one appeared a few days later while I was pretending to watch TV, followed by a second and third, and all three buzzed so loudly I couldn't concentrate on my sexting. I had to take a break and kill them.

_Splat!_

Dozens more materialized the following week.

By now, I was certain we had an infestation. But my wife insisted she hadn't seen any, and my son was too young to talk.

I called an exterminator.

"House is clean," he said after his inspection.

But it wasn't.

The wasps continued to show up, day after day, in ever-greater numbers. Any time I was home, they buzzed relentlessly. I stopped being able to sleep. I stopped being able to concentrate. The only time I felt any peace from them was at work, where my boss increasingly micro-managed me, and in the hotel, where my mistress had stepped up her nagging. "It's been almost a year! Are you gonna leave your wife or not?"

One day, I could barely take it anymore, and had to use every ounce of my self-control not to slap her across the face. "When my son is a little older," I said through clenched teeth.

On my wife's birthday, my wife and I took turns hiding from our son in a game of hide-and-seek. I hid in our shed. It was dark inside, and when the buzzing started I suddenly felt the wasps all around me, crawling on my face and limbs, and as I lurched for the exit I felt as if I were passing through an entire atmosphere of them! I imagined them flying down my throat, devouring my eyes, numbing my tongue…

I screamed and my wife had to calm me down. "It's OK, there aren't any more wasps," she repeated as she petted my hair like I was a dumb dog.

I took a sabbatical from work.

Because I was home all day, we cancelled daycare.

I checked the house insistently for the wasp lair. I knew there was one because I had already killed thousands.

That's when I saw it:

My son sleeping so peacefully, as a wasp exited his nostril. Another emerged from his ear.

I knew what had to be done. _What I had to do_.

Wasps _buzzed_. Phone _buzzed_.

I grabbed my golf club.

**_Splat!_ **


	10. My Cousin / Elizabeth

The 16th century turned. I lived with my father, a nobleman without acumen who had lent money he lacked means to collect or re-earn, and his sickly wife, for whom he had left my mother. I had three siblings, brothers—all dead: by illness, murder, suicide. Given my father’s circumstance, he hungered to marry me to a wealthy suitor, and likely would have done so if not for the letter, which arrived on a particularly cold October night, and which my father read with such rapt attention it bordered on candlelit glee, before instructing me, having communicated no details, that I would forthwith be dispatched to the Castle of Csejte in Upper Hungary to live with my cousin Elizabeth.

The trip was dismal, but I shall never forget my first impression of the castle, a magnificent hill-top silhouette boldly opaque against the crimson of a setting sun.

I met Elizabeth the following morning, and it was as if she were a magic mirror, for we were of identical height, build and pale complexion. We became natural friends and she shared everything with me: food, garments, jewelry. In exchange, my duties consisted of one: to dress finely and visit the nearby towns in search of women to enlist in Elizabeth’s employ and entourage. “Young and unblemished,” she said.

I lived in a dream.

It was not until months later, after I had procured many women for Elizabeth, that my suspicions began. Despite my memory for faces, I would often fail to meet those I had previously engaged. They came to Castle of Csejte—and vanished…

My conscience gnawed at my dreams.

One evening, I decided to follow one of the new women to satisfy my curiosity and return peace to my soul. Yet what I discovered was the very crux of dread. Deep within the castle grounds there existed a tangle of hallways leading to five uneven chambers, and within one of these: waxen female bodies hanging by chains fastened around ankles, throats opened over faces painted in dry blood, some still slowly dripping into a long trough, through which their virgin blood flowed into an adjacent room, in which, amidst the persistent buzzing of flies:

A solitary metal tub filled with scarlet, stillness and tranquility...

Its surface broken—

By the emergence of Elizabeth’s face!

I ran!

Through twisted hallways out under the anvillike night, through the grounds to the gate and beyond, over soft mounds through which despite my screams I heard the buried victims crying for impossible salvation.

Beating hooves.

Thunder in the back of my pulsing head.

I regained consciousness surrounded by warmth. But my comfort soured, _for I realized I was in the blood tub!_ Held there by the arms of servants who smiled and _called me by her villainous name!_

“Elizabeth.”

The investigators arrived. The description fit, as did the clothes, and the eye-witnesses agreed I was the one who had come for their daughters.

In defence, I had but truth:

A lifetime imprisonment of truth.


	11. This is the end, beautiful friend

**1968 / Vietnam**

_Thump-Thump-Thump..._

The Huey passed over dark jungleland like an over-sized dragonfly, as we sat clutching our rifles, listening to the deafening whir of the blades, not saying a goddamn word.

There were three of us (me, Ricky and the Captain) plus the pilot.

But the Captain wasn't a real captain. No, sir. He had civilian written all over him in ball-point legalese.

Then again, this wasn't a real mission, and all of us knew it.

_Something lit up below._

Ricky pointed.

"Nah," the Captain said. "Not it."

Wasn't exactly VC we were hunting. It was something else. "You'll know it when you see it," the Captain said. "Trust me."

They hadn't exactly given us a choice to be here. Ricky and me weren't saints, and when you fuck up too many times they've got you by the balls.

"There!"

_Neon glow. Trees parting like grass before a buffalo._

The pilot set us down, we got out, and the pilot took off.

_Thump-thump-thump…_

"Gonna tell us what the fuck it is now?" Ricky asked.

"Nope."

The Captain took out some kind of electronic gizmo and started walking, so we followed him.

I hated being in the jungle. Night got real dense real quick down here, and the insects…

Ricky pointed his rifle. "Stop. I heard something."

" _It's_ silent," the Captain said.

"Could be soldiers."

"If _it's_ here, there aren't any soldiers."

I could see them both sweating in the moonlight, and my rifle wasn't dry either, but we pressed on.

We came to a corridor of upended vegetation.

_Neon in the distance._

The Captain motioned for us to stop.

"Now," he said, fishing around in his pockets, "get ready because it's going to happen fast."

He took out a small metal sphere, looked at us in turn, and tossed it to Ricky.

"The fuck is—"

"Doesn't matter, just hold it. And don't shoot until I give the signal."

We were both looking at the neon glow ahead.

It seemed to be getting brighter.

We got ready.

This was it.

It's hard to describe what happened next:

_The neon rushed at us looming for an instant as a horned demon and it took all my willpower not to unleash on it and Ricky did lighting up the jungle bullet after bullet and the demon became neon again and dove into Ricky—_

"Fire!"

And I shot Ricky to motherfuckin' kingdom come. Just ripped him and that _thing_ open, and I swear to God he glowed for a moment when he fell dead.

The Captain retrieved the sphere.

We walked on shaking legs an hour in silence until we got to a village. But there wasn't a living soul there. Just a stench and hundreds of bodies: women, children…

The Captain took out a pistol and pointed it at my head.

My rifle didn't work.

"Sorry," he said, "but _it_ has to stay secret."

I retched, looking around at the eviscerated corpses.

"Thank you for your service."

He fired.


	12. As I Lay Decaying

I remember sharp morning light piercing the trees.

Glacial wind.

The voluminous silence.

I remember the heaviness of my backpack, the crunch of the undiscovered under my boots, and the awe of solitude in the mountains.

Then—

Sudden emptiness underfoot—

My body descending while my mind lingers, immobile for a few more sensations of its final landscape, as my soul, or whatever binds mind to body, stretches like an elastic...

Until the downward pressure is irresistible and my mind snaps back:

The unfathomable sensation of impact.

The horrid pain.

Followed by the merciful snapping of the neck. Audible, echoing…

Blackness.

The coarse sound of my own breathing.

No feeling below the jaw.

No mobility except the eyes, through which the darkness slowly dissipates, revealing the grey sky of an autumn afternoon across which scatter the black crows of despair.

When you've nothing but thoughts, thoughts achieve a terrifying dimension.

_I should have told someone where I was hiking._

_They won't find me in time._

I expect to die because such is the rational expectation. If not coldness, dehydration, or eventually starvation. Perhaps an animal ripping apart my throat. Perhaps madness.

But my body does not die. My cognition endures.

The minutes fall away.

_Hours._

A rain shower passes, moistening my face and throat. Although I have no voice, my mouth must be open.

Night chills me.

I hear ruthless nocturnal predation.

I persist.

On the break of the seventh day, a bird perches on my weathered face and drops a split worm into my mouth.

Insects follow, and I imagine them as a parade of nourishment marching single-file within me.

My broken body begins to decay.

At night, wolves tear away the dead and dying flesh.

Ants eat skin off my face.

Autumn cocoons me in her fallen leaves.

But always a creature drags them from my eyes, so that I see the clouds, the fluid sky, the surpassing of time by time. _Months_. Human legs step over without stopping, without identification. The leaves disintegrate. Snow accumulates like dust. Spring reveals dirt, moss and a mound with eyes. _Years_. I must be consciousness in a skull by now. I remember:

_As I lay decaying, the wolf with the woman's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades._

I lose time.

So many skies have passed.

When the she-wolf gazes down upon me as if at her own reflection—

I understand.

That night I prowl through her eyes.

I learn to bend my fingers: roots, branches; my arms: trunks; and feel through my antennae: swaying grass…

How good the first taste of human meat, lashed by vines and ripped apart, consumed in the darkest caves. But humanity is mere appetizer. What I crave is civilization. To grind flesh and skyscrapers into sludge, to spear tanks and eviscerate data centers, to pull down airliners as effortlessly as a frog catches flies. But I am young, and long shall on your decaying world I feast.


	13. Episode 7567

Ignacio Rojas was seventy-two when the doctor told him he was dying. He had three children, nine grandchildren and a long-term starring role on the soap opera (“Filmed live before a studio audience!”) _Passionista_ as Don Ignacio, the poor stable boy who had risen to become dictator of a fictional banana republic. Now in his senior years, he was keeping power by playing his devilishly handsome sons, Jorge and Luis Garcia, against one another in a high stakes game of scenery chewing.

All this was going through Ignacio’s mind when during a meeting, the show’s producer mentioned the idea.

“We want you to die on the show.”

The producer continued, “Not just die, but _really_ die. I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out…”

And Ignacio did. In exchange for Ignacio’s live on-screen death, the producer was going to pay [censored], more money than he had made in the last twenty years.

Thinking of his family, Ignacio agreed.

The scene, once written, was somber. Ignacio would be in a hospital bed, his sons kneeling on either side, and as he took his final breath their hands would meet across his dying body, symbolically ending their terrible feud. Power would be shared. Family would prevail over politics. The show’s viewers would join in a now-genuine mourning, and afterwards there would be a half-hour live tribute to the departed.

On the day of filming, after everyone had said their goodbyes, Ignacio gave a wonderful performance, culminating in his hospital bed scene. A real nurse hooked up a fake IV, through which the real killing drug would be administered, and as he said his final lines and closed his eyes, Ignacio prepared to die.

But instead of feeling arms meeting in truce, Ignacio heard shouting!

Jorge and Luis Garcia were arguing.

First about dictatorship, then brotherhood, and finally childhood.

Dulled by whatever had been pumped into his veins, Ignacio was unable to speak.

He barely sat up in bed—

Before Jorge’s fist cracked his cheek!

Luis Garcia turned on him too, jerking him up by his hospital gown, and the two brothers performed a hateful dialogue as they took turns pummeling him.

They knocked him out of bed and beat him mercilessly.

“The face! The face!” the producer instructed.

And the actors obliged, taking turns on Ignacio’s face until it was but a bloody quagmire with teeth.

“Now!”

Sputtering meekly on the floor, Ignacio could only watch as they picked up a heavy piece of machinery, no doubt bought for this very purpose, and smashed it against his head—once, twice, three times!—fragmenting it as audibly as a hollowed-out melon.

The music swelled. The credits rolled.

Blood pooled.

Followed by a message:

_What you saw today was real. Welcome to the future of television. For more information, visit_ [URL removed] _or support us on Kickstarter. Fuck_ [network name removed] _! Be part of the entertainment revolution._

Passionista _Episode 7567: In memory of Don Ignacio Rojas._

“And cut!”


	14. Undersiders

My name is Rudiger Hess. In the mid-2000s, my partner Emiel Meijer and I led a U.N. team of excavators working on mass graves in the Balkans.

During our investigations, we relied heavily on records corroborated by witness testimony in locating graves.

It was a successful method, and we were largely able to locate and excavate the graves we knew existed and occasionally find ones unknown to the official sources.

One day, we accidentally identified a massacre site whose very existence our normally helpful witnesses refused to acknowledge or even speak about to such a degree that they crafted the most elaborate counter-explanations.

Naturally, this piqued our interest and _despite the site being unconfirmed and therefore beyond the scope of our mission_ we proceeded to excavate.

We worked at night.

What we discovered was that under a shallow layer of buried corpses there existed a slab of concrete, and when we drilled through that concrete, we discovered an emptiness.

At first we believed it was a cave.

After some deliberation, of which the options were to forget the discovery and return to official work or investigate further, a vote returned a slim majority in favour of investigation.

As the leader, I was the first to be lowered into the emptiness.

What I found was remarkable.

For as I was lowered on a rope deeper and deeper, I found myself at the same time lifted into a city populated by humans such as ourselves _but whom gravity affected conversely!_

By way of illustration:

Imagine a tabletop on which someone has arranged a world of miniatures. Buildings, people. This is our world. Now imagine that on the underside of the same tabletop someone has arranged another but upside-down world of miniatures. Finally, imagine the tabletop contains a hole, through which a miniature from our world may fall upwards into the sky of the underside world and _vice versa_ because to the underside world ours is the upside-down.

When first I entered the emptiness, the Undersiders stopped in the streets and pointed at me.

Drivers pulled over, pedestrians dropped groceries.

Inverted birds flew past.

And I gripped the rope tightly, knowing that to let go would mean forever falling into the atmosphere—or beyond.

The first Undersiders with whom I interacted were police, but my first true communication was with a Serbian-speaking _ad hoc_ committee of technocrats.

I was "lying" on the ceiling of a boardroom in which they were seated.

When they gave their names, I recognized them as murder victims, _some of whose bodies I myself had excavated._

"And your name?" they asked me.

I gave it, and after a twenty-minute recess they reconvened and told me I had been murdered years ago.

I inquired about the circumstances.

"You were killed with your family during a recent war. The perpetrator was caught, tried and executed under orders of a military tribunal."

"Who was the perpetrator?" I asked out of blind curiosity.

They checked their papers.

"Emiel Meijer."


	15. I clicked on clickbait and it took over my life.

I consider myself a fairly sophisticated internet user. I know what to click, what not to click. I can easily identify a genuine email from spam, and I make sure to have different passwords for my various accounts. I can also tell low quality content from high quality content. Lately, however, I've noticed a sizable increase in clickbaity titles even from generally respectable sources: non-celebrity YouTubers, Washington Post, even /nosleep authors.

I chalked it up to a need for impressions and revenue, and dropped my guard a bit.

At first it was harmless.

I checked out the top five reasons why some political party will lose the next election, the ten best horror movies of the last decade, the tastiest vegan Thanksgiving recipes, etc.

I made sure to click only if I trusted the source, and it was actually kind of fun. The reading was light and fluffy.

But soon that wasn't enough for me, and I became more reckless, venturing onto unknown platforms and websites, clicking links haphazardly, and feeling a deep, growing desire to know just how inappropriately customers behaved at Walmart or why the fourth photo on a list of amazing wildlife photos would blow my mind.

I couldn't stop myself...

That's when I found the ultimate clickbait title: _The Ultimate Way To Avoid Clickbait! (Never Be Fooled Again!)_

I clicked the link—

And you won't believe what happened next!

Popup after popup opened on my screen, each emitting a hideous MIDI noise, as the screen flashed, Comic Sans fought Papyrus, and there were so many suggestive photos and exclamation marks that my laptop started to emit smoke!!!

I unplugged the cord but the battery was full and I watched the laptop start to melt into goo.

I ran downstairs.

"Honey!" I yelled. "You won't believe what just happened!"

My wife ran out to meet me.

I explained it to her.

"Here are five reasons why you shouldn't worry," she said. "One, it was an old laptop. Two, you always wanted…"

I left her standing there and ran out of the house.

As I fumbled with the phone in my pocket, the mailman walked past. He smiled, I smiled. "I just delivered five pieces of mail to you, and number two will change your life!" he said.

_Oh, God!!!_

But if I could count on anyone to be wise, measured and calm, it was my father. I turned away from the mailman and called him. "Dad, it's me."

"Norman! How are you?"

"Not so good."

"Do you know who else isn't so good today? Your mother. You forgot her birthday."

He was right.

"Thankfully, I'm a definitive guide to making it up to someone after forgetting their birthday," he continued. "I'll also tell you the top ten gifts mothers love to get—"

I ended the call.

Clickbait was everywhere!

Even in my thought process, as I considered _the best/worst ways to check my sanity!_

Finally I opened AO3 and started writing: 

**I clicked on clickbait…**


	16. The Final Concerto

I met Alexander on an online classical music forum when I was twelve. He was eleven, and we were both musical prodigies.

Although Alexander lived in St. Petersburg and I in New York, we became friends. Not only did we understand each other in a way others could not, but we pushed each other musically—

To a point.

Because by the time we entered high school, it had already become clear to me Alexander was special even among prodigies. Our technical skills may have been equivalent, but he possessed an unteachable visionary quality I had never seen before: a singular madness!

When he emailed me years later to say he was working on a piano concerto to end the world, I believed him.

# \- - -

_They thought me insane when I suggested it, but what I wouldn't give to see their faces now, as we are already more than halfway finished the ascent, and not even the unexpected snows have managed to turn us back or even delay us! Everything goes according to plan, although I admit I am purposefully keeping these entries short for the bitter cold attacks my fingers mercilessly at this high altitude in the Himalayas, and I must not allow any stupidities now. We must continue. We must!_

—Alexander S., _Journals_ (Vol. III)

# \- - -

_A reporter dressed in anorak, hat and gloves, struggles to speak into his microphone against the prevailing wind._

Reporter: ...as you might see behind me, the avant-garde Russian composer is personally leading this train of Sherpas up the mountain, to where he plans in a week's time to premiere his third and final piano concerto in what he is calling "apocalypse music" and others an ill-advised publicity stunt.

# \- - -

_We almost lost a cello [illegible] the abyss [...] not even God can stop us now._

—Alexander S., _Journals_ (Vol. III)

# \- - -

Did I keep up with the news? Yes, like most of the world. It's difficult to believe but a classical news story was the top headline. The news people are always thirsty for a tragedy, and they felt one here. They just predicted the wrong kind of tragedy.

# \- - -

_Badly stabilized footage from a helicopter, finally focussing on a snowy mountain peak on which a small orchestra has been set up._

_A figure moving._

Reporter: Zoom in. That's him.

_The figure sits behind a piano._ [Static] _The first notes of a musical composition—_

# \- - -

It was a work of unquestionable genius.

# \- - -

_Bedlam in an unidentified city. Collapsing skyscrapers, shrieking crowds. Military vehicles roll by._

# \- - -

[Phone footage]

_Tanks in the foreground._

_A mountain in the background, around whose peak fighter planes buzz like insects as a gelatinous bubble begins to expand, vaporizing the planes on contact…_

Unidentified Speaker: Oh God!

_The bubble grows and grows until it reaches the phone camera_ —

# \- - -

Do I ever listen to the concerto? No. It's still too painful. I knew many of the four billion who died, but I still hear it sometimes in my head. The notes...

Inevitable _really_.


	17. In The Skin

Dr. Milanesi had been the Bakers' pediatrician for fourteen years and guided both their older girls healthily into teenagehood, so it was with the utmost trust they left him alone with their youngest, three-month old Clara, who had come down with an unusual rash.

As he examined the girl, Dr. Milanesi could barely contain his glee, for as he scraped across her reddened skin with his instrument, it made the most wonderful sound, _like a dying man's fingernails scratching hopelessly against the asphalt of a dark alley…_

Later, after arranging the pentagram and other occult necessities, and fortifying himself with several glasses of Cognac, Dr. Milanesi made the call.

"She is found," he told the Grey Man.

The assault occurred behind the downtown building in which Mr. Baker worked.

He had exited, Clara cradled in his arms, when they appeared.

The killing was quick. He had not even time to scream before he was stabbed, Clara taken and his throat slashed—cascading blood while his fingers scratched in terror at the alley floor.

They brought Clara sedated to the Grey Man.

He needed a cocoon.

For this, the Grey Man hunted alone. He had his selection, for the city was laden with homeless, junkies and other undesirables, many of whom were already but walking dead. He chose finally for youth and innate vitality. The process would be arduous and survival the prime consideration.

The Grey Man acted—

The victim awoke to immobility. His eyes bugged, rolling madly in their sockets, before coming to a half-closed rest. His limbs were secured to the granite slab on which he lay. After his initial burst of fear, he babbled incessantly, but the syllables meant nothing. His tongue had been removed, tied into a gag, and stuffed back into his mouth.

Dr. Milanesi watched him impatiently from above. Myriad surgical instruments glistened on a cart opposite the granite slab.

"Let him bleed his demons," the Grey Man said, rocking the slumbering Clara, now raw and scabby, in his arms.

Finally the victim fell silent.

Dr. Milanesi applied the anesthetic, and began the procedure.

He inserted a scalpel below the victim's neck and sliced downward, before unfolding the body like an organic briefcase and removing the organs until the victim was muscle, bone and emptiness. He then placed the extracted organs into several glass containers set beside the victim on the slab. The organs squirmed; the jars steamed. Next, he reconnected the external organs to the body, taking especial care with the pumping lungs and beating heart, so that the victim remained alive.

At last, the Grey Man lowered Clara gently into the fleshy cavity, and Dr. Milanesi sutured the enveloping skin.

For sixty-six days, Clara remained within the victim, whose externalized viscera worked rhythmically for benefit of host and parasite alike.

On the eve of the sixty-seventh, she emerged—

Penetrating claws—

Ripping apart the victim's chest until standing bloody and revealed before them: glorious gargoyle-child with skin of impenetrable stone!

"Beautiful evil."


	18. I Had An Angel Once

I first saw her near the bus station in Brown Hill when it was bad but not as bad as it is now. I was sitting on the bench coming off a high. She had the cleanest hair I’d seen in weeks. It was sitting beside me, shining. I didn’t think it was real until she spoke and her voice cracked, and she said, “Vin Procter?”

The bus came. People got off. I didn’t get on. Then the bus went and I nodded my head, all the time hearing things like under water, even my own voice: “Vin Procter, that’s right, what’s it to you, you Kenny’s?”

“I’m sorry to meet you in public like this,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “But that’s the way for first times. Later, we’ll see each other everywhere.”

We were alone in Brown Hill. Only the wind blew garbage across the street. The garbage stuck against the curb. Plastic cups and paper fast food containers and other dirty unidentifiables. She reached out a hand and put it softly on mine. It was warm and wet as the insides of my head. “Who are you?”

The words bubbled.

“I’m your addiction,” she said.

I got up before it got dark and she followed me home.

I lived in an abandoned building on Merryweather Street. In the winter I moved elsewhere, but it was late September and not cold yet. Addiction followed me through the front door and closed it. When I opened the fridge, she looked over my shoulder. I wasn’t hungry. I looked around. My furniture was damp, dusty and unappealing. My drug paraphernalia stood on a silver platter on the worn carpet. I curled up on the floor next to it and went to sleep.

The afternoon light burned my pale skin so that I flinched, then pulled opened my lids and I gasped. Little sound came out but my eyes bugged. I ripped the blanket off my body and stared at the woman in the kitchen. My brains were arid now. A train went by somewhere and the paraphernalia shook on the platter. I smelled fried eggs.

“You’re up,” she said without looking at me. “You slept for a long time. I made breakfast but it cooled and I ate it for lunch. I’ll make another egg in a few minutes. Maybe you’d like coffee first?”

I crept toward her.

She continued, “I bought eggs and coffee, and milk. You had milk but it was old. I poured it out. Your toilet doesn’t flush properly.”

The heat radiated from the stovetop. I thought about heating my spoon, but the woman was stressing me. I rubbed my knuckles into my eyes.

“There was money in the tin in the cupboard but I didn’t use it,” she said.

For a second I was searching frantically through the containers under my bed where I kept all my stuff, maybe she’d taken it, thief, then the mellow came with the egg smell again and the woman said, “I didn’t touch anything else.”

She cracked a shell and poured the contents onto the burning butter on the frying pan. The white sizzled and turned hard. She did another, then tossed both shells into the garbage. I had forgotten I had a garbage. I never took it out. The raccoons snuck in and got it sometimes and I hit them with the broom handle but not hard enough. The raccoons scampered out. Sometimes I thought about eating one.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She finally turned to look at me. “I’m your addiction. We met yesterday on the bench in public. I’ll be living with you openly now.”

The eggs finished frying and she slid them onto a plate that she set on the table in the kitchen where a fork was already lying. “Sit.”

I sat and ate quickly with little chewing. After licking the last moisture from my fingers, I asked, “What do you do?”

She laughed and spun her head such that her hair sparkled round her face. It was clean and shiny, I thought. “I take over your life,” she said or smiled. And I smiled too. It had been a long time since I’d had a woman and it was good to have one. I could start a new life now. I was happy. The stress was gone. The shakes were gone. I wished I could shower but the water was turned off and I said, “You can wash the pan and dishes in the yard. There’s a little hole I dug to catch the water. There’s always a puddle in it.”

When she went outside I whistled and sat with my back against the sofa. I picked up the silver platter and put each piece of paraphernalia carefully on the carpet. I wasn’t wearing a belt but pulled a spare from under the sofa. The flint clicked. The flame from the lighter was nice, not like the light from outside, which made my eyes narrow and skin hurt. I pulled my sleeve up to where the inside of my elbow was polka dots and heated the stuff and then pricked myself until the world rolled back into my skull.

The world rolled in dark, with crickets.

Addiction was sitting in a chair reading a book by candlelight. I stared at her until I coughed and she put the book down and said, “That’s the last time.”

I nodded off to sleep.

I woke up with a headache and the shakes. The stress was back bad. Addiction was gone and I rummaged through the tins in the cupboards where I kept my money. But there wasn’t any so I threw the empty tins across the room, then slid onto my heels and bit my fingernails till they bled. I had a woman now, I thought, I had to support her and love her and be the man for her. It was a family. I determined to get a job. I crawled to the sofa and took out my stuff. There was enough left. I’d sell part of it. I didn’t want to be a deadbeat anymore. From now on, I would be responsible. I picked up all the pieces of paraphernalia scattered on the carpet and placed them on the silver platter. Tomorrow—I set the alarm on my watch—I would sell, then we’d have a baby and the crib would go in the other bedroom where the raccoons sometimes slept.

The alarm beeped.

I felt lips against my cheeks. She was back. She smelled good, like not at all. Her face was close to mine but her clothes were different. “I’m going to work today,” I said.

But when I got to my feet my knees seemed to crumble and I dropped to the carpet. I needed my stuff. I started to crawl but a reflection pushed me back. I shied away and saw her put the silver platter at my feet. I loved her more than I’d ever loved her as I put my things in order and heated up the stuff and pricked deep into the polka dot spot, letting my thumb press the receding world into me.

Someone slapped me before the world came back. And then it came back firm like the time Kenny pushed my face into the highway. I checked my nose for blood but there wasn’t any. There was just the woman in front of me. She slapped me again. And again, until I lifted my legs and wrapped my arms around them and the blows hit only the outside of my body. I tried to close my eyes and hum a song but I couldn’t get the feeling back. I was stressing out. I was afraid my mouth was going to foam. Then cold water hit me. It flowed onto my tongue and I knew the taste of my own puddle. “Up,” she said and I obeyed. But when I stood I stood on the needle. My foot hurt and the needle cracked. I cursed. I would have to get a new one from that place.

I threw a coat over my shoulders, put a pack of the stuff under my arm and went out through the front door. She followed me. I meandered until people thickened, which meant I was closer to downtown where the place was. Eventually I got there. The sign said “Cole Recovery Centre”. I went inside and cried until the people gave me a new needle and a card with phone numbers on it. I had to be careful. The stuff was still in me and my eyes wanted to give along with my balance, which meant I almost dropped the stuff onto the floor.

Outside, the breeze was picking up and my nostrils opened to let it in. The woman smiled at me. I smiled back. I wanted to use the new needle but I had a family now. I felt responsible. I knew the best place to sell. I’d been going there for months and had never seen a dealer. It was open territory. I walked in long strides with no shuffling of the feet, hands buried in my coat pockets, knowing the woman would be proud of the money I’d make.

The very young ones I wouldn’t sell to, but the older ones had money and they could steal more. It wasn’t right in the schoolyard either. I wasn’t unprincipled. It was behind, by the chain link fence, where the older ones went to smoke cigarettes. One was there now, in jeans and a baseball cap. I banged on the fence with my fist until the kid saw me and came cautiously nearer.

“You wanna buy some?” I wheezed.

The kid stepped closer. He made sure no one was watching. He had a tough face and an earring and smelled like smoke. I knew the kid wouldn’t ever be anybody.

“What you selling?”

The kid’s voice was strong and he kept his eyebrows slanted inwards like he was angry all the time. They straightened only for a second when he saw the woman when she moved closer to me.

“Stuff,” I said.

I took it out from under my arm and held it against the fence where the kid could see it and smell it and touch it through the chain link.

“How much?” the kid asked.

“However much you got,” I said. “You don’t got enough for the whole.”

The kid’s voice cracked just like the woman’s had done in Brown Hill. He said, “Fifty,” and fished through his pockets to gather up the bills. When he had them, he crunched them into a ball and raised his voice, saying, “Give me the stuff first, then I’ll give you the money.”

But I only laughed and the kid lowered his eyes to the ground.

“Cash first.”

As the kid moved close enough to put the fifty dollar ball through the chain link, the woman leaned in and whispered close to my ear, “Are you sure you want to sell that? Won’t you miss it tonight on the carpet?”

Suddenly the shakes returned and I grabbed the fence and made it rattle. The kid dropped the cash and jumped back. I was abruptly aware that the kid and everyone else but the woman was trying to cheat me out of my stuff. The muscles in my body tightened so bad I couldn’t get my fingers off the fence so I kicked at the fence until the muscles relaxed and I pulled my hand free. Then I laughed again almost like a howl and put the stuff back under my arm. The wind was picking up and it started to drizzle. As me and the woman walked away the kid was on his knees trying to put his hand through the chain link to pick up the money but his wrist was too thick and he couldn’t get it through but pushed so hard the skin on his hand started to raw.

When we got home I sat with my back to the sofa and heated up my spoon. But every time the heat was good the stuff fell off and I got angry. I realized it was the woman knocking the stuff off. “What’s the idea?” I moaned, though she just knocked it off again and told me I wouldn’t have it easy anymore.

In the morning it was the same and in the afternoon the silver platter kept moving and I couldn’t get a solid read on it. By the evening the foam was starting in my mouth, my teeth were itchy and all the woman did was sit in her chair and read her book and wait for me to try to get at my stuff, which I couldn’t do because I couldn’t remember where the silver platter was and the spoon had a big hole drilled in it.

I hated her now like I’d never hated anyone.

“What’s the idea, what are you, get out of my house!” I screamed at her.

“I’m your addiction,” she answered.

I wasn’t an addict, though, that much I knew, so I screamed, “You’re not real,” and asked everyone who was around whether they could see the woman. When no one answered I said, “See, you’re not real,” and went to the kitchen to pick up the frying pan that the woman had fried eggs in and swung it hard at her head until she fell and the sound of the pan against her head was dull and she didn’t move anymore.

I was sweating so I went outside and washed my face in the puddle. When I came back in, I heated my stuff on the red frying pan and pressed the plunger of the new needle into a pulsing vein.

The light that woke me was worse than the light from outside. The stars were out. Someone had taken the belt off my arm and shrunk my house. I was on the sofa. There were men and windows all around. The lights flashed red and white. Someone knocked loud against the glass and I looked and there was a flashlight shining into my face. I closed my eyes and brought my knees high and wrapped my arms around them.

“Junkie,” the flashlight said through the window—

Then shut off.

And in the darkness I knew I had an angel once, and she was no more.


	19. Lysis 14:1–24

The Lord appeared to Blake near the great ocean of Atlantic while he was engineering. The sun was high in the smothering sky. Blake looked up from his blueprint and upon not recognizing the Lord asked, "Who dares disturb me from my work?"

The Lord laughed thunder and said, "Does the forgotten wind not blow apart the constructions of Man? For if salvation lay in forgetting, how safe would be the ignorant horde."

Upon hearing these words, Blake fell to his knees and bowed. "I recognize the Creator," he declared, "in whose image we also create, so that the World is one day made into the temple of the Lord."

Then the Lord said, "Heed this warning: The World boils, and the Northern ice drips with melt. Trapped within are Demons whose thawing will be the end of Man and his creations."

Blake asked, "What is to be done?"

Then the Lord said: "You must construct a Gargantua into which shall fit all the peoples of the World. For only here will they be saved. You must design it, and you must build it of metal and electronics, and it must be made secure against the Demons and cold against the growing Heat. Once this is done, I shall devastate the Demons and restore order to the World."

Blake heard how wise were the words of the Lord. "It shall be done."

For one year and six months, Blake worked upon the design, as the World did boil and the Northern ice dripped ominously with melt, just as the Lord had said.

And when the design was complete, all of the World's great factories toiled in harmony to bring reality to the design and construct upon the Earth a metal Gargantua as never before had been. In this, Man was united, and in his unity was borne the fruit of success.

On the day in which the last of the World's peoples had sought refuge in the Gargantua, the Lord appeared again before Blake.

The Lord said, "The Heat already grows, and the Demons rattle in their thawing cages. But their wrath is not yet inflicted upon the World."

Then the Lord commanded Blake to enter the Gargantua, seal the doors and start the cooling mechanism. And Blake did so, for such was the word of the Lord, guardian of all Creation.

But the Lord was wise, and in his wisdom had altered the design of the Gargantua, so that once the cooling began, it could not be stopped. And so it was that all the peoples of the world, trapped like Demons within their gargantuan tomb, froze into death.

Then the Lord laughed thunder and devastated the tomb into a rain of ice that fell upon the World as rain.

The Lord asked, "Who dares disturb me from my work?"

The answer was Silence.

And it was good.


	20. Kamikaze Corps

O'Bannon's wife birthed their first child on the day the asteroid received its name: 7Plutus. In hindsight, it was fate. Two more children, a wedding and a house in the D.C. suburbs followed. The children grew; 7Plutus sailed along its orbit, carrying a cargo of metal more precious than everything on Earth. A new gold rush erupted.

The first corporation to land on the surface was Vectorien.

They staked their claim according to the nascent international laws of space mining, developed an HQ and began exploitation.

Mining proceeded smoothly—until discovery of the Zorg: amorphous entities of unknown liquid, which absorbed and dissolved man and metal alike. The press dubbed them _snoglobules_.

The first Zorg assault destroyed most of Vectorien's machinery and crew, but the company adapted. They developed weapons to vapourize the Zorg, and established an asteroid-wide defense force to protect their investment.

It worked until November 9, 2097, the day the Zorg first appeared on Earth, materializing in downtown Barcelona and causing such panic and unprecedented material destruction that the U.N. declared a global emergency.

More attacks followed: Lagos, Chicago, Nanjing, Warsaw, Chennai.

Earth lived on edge.

Vectorien sold its weapon technology to governments that could afford it but refused to accept any responsibility for the attacks. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there was no direct link between Vectorien's mining on 7Plutus and the Zorg raids, meaning the company owed no compensation.

Vectorien's profits grew as earthside casualties increased.

On July 17, 2098, the Zorg hit the D.C. suburbs.

O'Bannon watched in helpless terror as a _snoglobule_ absorbed his wife and children, and they, caught as in gelatin, disintegrated into pink mist.

He vowed revenge.

On September 1, 2098, the U.N. voted into existence the 1st International Space Brigade, tasked with neutralizing the Zorg threat.

In January 2099, a Vectorien mining crew discovered a complex cave-system on 7Plutus, terminating in a massive liquid-filled cavity: a breeding chamber home to a Zorg Queen.

On February 3, 2099, the U.N. initiated a secret mission whose objective was infiltration and eradication of the breeding chamber.

It was a suicide mission.

Clandestine recruitment began the same month. One of those contacted was O'Bannon, and he agreed. In total, nine were selected. They called themselves _Kamikaze Corps_.

When they finally disembarked on 7Plutus, their orders were simple: rendezvous at Vectorien HQ, attach to a mining crew and converge on the breeding chamber, where they were to _use any means necessary to neutralize the Zorg without compromising Vectorien's mining operation_.

They had ample bombs.

But at HQ, the mission changed dramatically. Led by O'Bannon, four Corps members mutinied. A firefight ensued, after which only O'Bannon and two allies remained alive.

Before Vectorien's security forces could react, and before Earth even realized, they had blasted into Vectorien's subterranean warehouses, barricaded themselves inside, and swiftly wired their own reworked bombs to Vectorien's stash of mining explosives.

On September 22, 2099, while clutching a memento of his family, O'Bannon eradicated the threat—


	21. We Are The Broken Idol

I had crossed the six-lane suspension bridge before dawn, and spent the morning hiking in the park across the bay as, hidden from me, the city woke—office windows illuminating, human flesh-gears groaning into the motions of another self-rotation—taking its first great breaths with lungs of politics and commercial profitability: civilization in its prime: America undaunted.

By afternoon, I had summited and sat on a warm flat rock, lunch spread enticingly beside me and legs dangling lazily above the world. I watched the city's glass skyscrapers reflect the glowing sun, whose rays danced across the water like golden waves on an oscilloscope, and listened to the soulless hum of a million empty cars, a million disconnected voices…

The first mollusk man emerged unnoticed from the bay.

Grey clouds enveloped the sky.

The day grew suddenly oppressive, but threatened more than rain, as if the firmament itself was but a membrane—now taut, and compressing under the horrible weight of an accumulation of stars: the pressure, felt in the air as much as in my ears, of a dark and cosmic inevitability.

The city paid no heed.

But I watched with rapt attention as more of them emerged, black pin pricks surfacing in the silvery waters of the bay, swimming and walking towards the unsuspecting shore, a gathering pointillist nightmare lapping at the very edges of urbanity.

_Hypnosis._

Broken by a movement behind—

Three mollusk men emerging from the vegetation, marching single file along the path toward me: human-sized cephalopods clad in woven microplastic robes, their tentacular whiskers flowing in the illusion of a liquified air.

Instinctively, I retreat.

Blind to me they shuffle past.

They stop.

_Sirens._

They raise their shiny arms and begin the incantation, speaking syllabic chains of hideous incomprehensibility. Less language than a syntax of miasma, and indeed their words escape their loose and flapping mouths as an iridescent vapour—three strands that rise, and rising intertwine...

I look toward the city:

_The flashing of emergency lights._

_The chaos of invasion._

_The warping of the heavens_ —

to which from everywhere the same trinities of braided vapour-chant ascend!

Syllable upon terrible syllable broken intermittently by the thumping of helicopter blades, the pitter-patter of machine gunfire and the wailing of the damned.

Humanity is lost.

The incantation reaches a crescendo!

Space-time tears like a rag.

The sky opens:

The dead and dying stars collapse on us as cosmic rubble, and across the bay, beyond the darkened city, a great carmine fire erupts, casting demon shadows on what remains of our reality and rendering the city skyline a dreadful silhouette.

Then rumbling.

The world itself quakes!

The incantations cease—

The bond between gods and matter has ruptured! The dread-skyline is lifted, higher and higher—until its jaggedness and buildings transform into the ancient teeth of the lower mandible of Moloch! Now fusing with the upper jaw; abominable skull, whose size: impossible, forged in a crucible of our own making. Shedding all detritus of progress, he grows: Primal: He becomes, _and we are undone_.


	22. Dear Bette Davis

Don't get me wrong. If I remember anything from The Big Sleep it's Lauren Bacall with a cigarette between her lips. And Bette Davis had gloriously sad smoking eyes when Paul Henreid lit up a deuce in Now, Voyager. Later, there was Monica Vitti, Giulietta Masina and Anna Karina. I don't remember if that trio smoked, but, if it did, I'm sure the puffs were sensual and glamorous (and possibly heartbreakingly tragic in Masina's case). So don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the movies. I spent a good part of my childhood lusting over dead and aging actresses. But besides the time I put an end to my mom's cassette deck with a copy of Nights of Cabiria that I borrowed from the library and never returned, the movies lie. The stench and the irritation of the eyes and the bad teeth don't penetrate the silver screen. The story ends before the skin yellows and tightens into the leather they use to make fake Italian sofas. And don't get me started on the clothes: saturated with an entire history of matches and lighters and Saturday afternoons spent coughing in the garage.

Listen, I don't mean to sound like a smoking infomercial. The truth is that I don't care how many people die from throat cancer or if underprivileged kids have to suck in second hand smoke because their parents get the shakes if they don't light up every hour on the hour. All I care about—and what I can't get out of my head—is the sweet mouth of Ginnie Peters in the eighth grade, open and waiting for me and my tongue in a little nook on the southwest wall of St. Bartholomew's Elementary. I'll never forget that first taste of saliva. No lingering mintiness of sugar-free gum, no taste bud memories of a winter morning’s bitter black coffee. Just sweet, warm and fresh saliva replenishing itself with the swallow-swallow frequency of a nervous teenage girl. If you happen know the album cover for King Crimson's In The Court of the Crimson King or maybe Edvard Munch's Screams, you know that once adulthood hits, open mouths become the gaping maws of monsters. But back then it was still the pinnacle of burgeoning eroticism to see those jaws spread and the spit coming down the sides of Ginnie Peters’ teeth like my own private Niagara Falls. I stuck my tongue into that beautiful cavity and lapped up the taste.

Recess and noon hour and sometimes after school, weeks upon weeks, we spent in that spot with our faces joined at the lips, exchanging fluids. Of course, it wasn't all about the saliva. There were also the teeth and the tongues, and the hotness of breath making the tiny hairs on your upper lip stand up. Sometimes there were the hands, too, but we didn't do much of that. It was other young couples that snuck off to explore the insides of each other's underwear. We were mouth people.

Even before our lickings and suckings started we'd been friends. Ask my mom where I was when I wasn't home and she'd nine of ten answer, "He's probably off with Ginnie somewhere." Nine of ten she was right, too. Probably in Ginnie's basement, where she and her brother Felton had set up a room especially for audio-visual pleasures. A giant rear projection TV against the wall, a Japanese stereo and, in both corners, big Bose towers with enough bass to restart your heart. Although Felton generally left us alone, he was our primary source for movies. He was older than Ginnie—in his last year of high school. A couple of his friends were already in college, so he'd raid their college libraries for us, bringing back 70s rock albums and the classics of Hollywood and European cinema. If there was anything more appealing than sucking out every last drop of Ginnie Peter's unspoilt saliva, it was feasting on that saliva while Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham fell in love on screen.

The trouble with Nicholas Ray films, however, is that they usually don't end well for the lovers. You see, brother Felton picked up another thing from his college buddies: the taste for nicotine. I first caught on from the faint smell on his jacket. He was discrete with his habit and good at airing out his clothes, but versus someone with an acute sense of cigarette smell like me it wasn't enough. When I sheepishly asked him about it one day while Ginnie was in the bathroom, his face turned red to match the colour of the popped blood vessels in his eyes and he begged me not to tell Ginnie or his parents. Cigarettes weren't all he was smoking, and he was glad to buy my silence for a pack of Camels that I didn't even particularly want. I wasn't going to talk anyway but he pushed them into my hand and nodded like we'd just concluded an international arms deal, so I kept them.

Which brings me back to Lauren Bacall with the cig dangling from her lips in The Big Sleep, me and Ginnie on the couch, our lips mutually wet, and Ginnie's hands making a rare trip under my shirt, then down my body to the tops of my jeans and toward the front pocket where I'd stashed my Camels that day so that I could brag about them to a friend at school. She didn't actually stop kissing me until she pulled out the pack and smiled, saying, "I didn't know you smoked." I was about to say that I didn't when the shot came up—Bacall sucking on that filter-less piece of shredded dry tobacco—and I let my pulsating youth get the better of me.

"You should try it," I said, "I bet you'd look good with a cigarette."

She laughed and took one out of the pack. She held it up and looked at it, then spun it round a few times before sticking one end between her lips. I felt a pang of jealousy, but only a pang. Then she smiled and struck a Hollywood pose. There she was: my own personal Vivian Rutledge. I told her to stay right there and I ran to my book bag, where I carried the cheap camera the school had given me to take pictures for the yearbook. She struck another pose and I got a decent shot. And another. And she said, "Wait, it won't look the same without the smoke," paused, then added, "but there's probably a lighter around here somewhere."

There wasn't. So she came back with an old book of camping matches—the kind that supposedly work underwater—which worked just as well above it. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, and exploded into a sandpaper-coarse cough. She took another drag and it looked good to see her struggle with it. When her coughing calmed down a little I took some more shots. She'd been right: she did look better with her softly moving lips cushioning the smoke up toward the ceiling. The only regret I had was that the world wasn't in 35mm black and white.

After she'd smoked the cigarette down to the nub, she handed it to me like an urn of human remains and with the utmost reverence I put it in the garbage, even wrapping it in a used tissue to make sure it wouldn't be found.

The movie had already finished and no one had shut off the television when I got back on top of her and licked her lower lip. She stunk bad up close, that much I could tell right away. But it wasn't until I actually tasted the inside of her mouth that the full horror of what I'd done stuck its talons into the tender underbelly of my heart and ripped me open. I didn't throw up in her mouth. I at least managed to pull away and run. But I didn't manage the bathroom, either. I stopped somewhere between the kitchen and the dining room and flung out my dinner onto the Peters' faultless hardwood floor.

Ginnie helped me clean up. She was sweet as usual. That was probably the worst thing about it. I could handle the embarrassment and the lack of self-respect that comes with throwing up in front of the girl you're in love with, but to see her unchanged sweet exterior while knowing that inside she was changed—charred. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. I looked into her eyes, "Promise me, Ginnie, promise that you'll never smoke another cigarette." She promised and sealed the promise with a kiss on my cheek. I clamped down on my teeth till I tasted calcium to stop from shuddering at the smell of her smoke-infected hair, but I believed her.

July 24, 1945. Potsdam. President Harry S. Truman leans over to Joseph Stalin and whispers that the Americans have perfected the atomic bomb. Stalin nods in understanding. Truman scratches his head at the lack of a reaction, Stalin makes a mental note about the expediency of spying. Consequently, while I was never one to advocate peeping on one's allies, espionage among friends is a little like torture: condemnable, but with benefits. And so the Monday after next I decided to sleuth after Ginnie after school. Where was she going, I asked. To her aunt's for dinner. Where did she go? To our little nook on the southwest wall of St. Bartholomew's Elementary.

By now we both think we know how this ends. There is no other boy. There is no secret lesbian girlfriend. There is only Ginnie and her fingers fiddling with a pack of Camels that she paid her brother to get for her.

Or at least you think you know how this ends. What you don't know is that every second that it takes her fingers holding the cigarette to reach the level of her lips is a punch to the liver. What you don't know is that each sniff as she runs the cigarette under her nose and delights in the smell of that putrid paper is a dull knife scratch to the wrists. By the time she takes out a lighter and ignites the flame, my knees are buckling. Blood is coming out of my nose, my ears. And when she touches the flame to the tip of the cigarette, my limbs catch fire.

Suddenly her eyes move to look straight at me across the schoolyard. She takes a step toward me. I want to run. I want to get away, but I can't move. All I can feel is the heat. She takes a drag. The sound is unbearable: like my soul being sucked out. My skin crackles and starts to melt from my bones. She comes closer. I think people are starting to scream. Or maybe I'm screaming. I touch my face but there isn't one anymore, only a hard, white skull. She smiles. There are two cigarettes in her mouth. She puffs on both. Then takes one from her lips and holds it out to me. I don't want it, but I can't swat it away. My arms are charcoal. She pushes the cigarette between my teeth. My body burns out from under me. I feel myself getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I am nothing but a skull resting on a hill of ashes.

"Don't let's ask for the moon," she says as she picks me up and holds me in her hands. "We have the stars."

She gives me a kiss and our teeth clatter against each other.

There is no saliva. There is no wetness.

If I am ever properly buried, please write the following on my tombstone:

Dear Bette Davis,  
Fuck You.


	23. I think I screwed us in the 1960s

I've started writing this hundreds of times and never gotten to the end. The first few times I tried, I did it on paper in a notebook because the internet hadn't been invented yet. I burned the notebooks. This is the first time I've finished and not destroyed what I'd written. If nothing else, this act of creation without destruction is a small victory to me, but I know you hardly care about that. Nor should you. You should care about what you're about to read because if what I say is true, your generation may be in some serious shit. I'm in my late 70s, no wife or kids, not many friends, and although I'm not quite on my death bed, I'm certainly nearing the end of my life, so my personal stake in this is low, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't weight heavily on my soul in an existential kind of way. We all keep secrets, some darker than others, and this has been my darkest.

The story starts in California way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar with that period in history, the one word I'd use to describe it is turbulent. Just imagine the straight-laced world of the 1950s you know from television crashing head-on into what you probably associate with hippie culture, namely radical politics, protest, heavy drug use, rebellion against authority, and conspiracy theories, but also comradery, selflessness, and the genuine belief that it is possible to change the world for the better. I was a university student at the time, so you could say I was in the thick of it, but I wasn't at one of the true hotbed schools like Berkeley. That said, there was almost no way to be young and alive in California and to keep away from the upheaval. It was literally all around you, and it sucked you in. There wasn't a Friday night when you didn't listen to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, take LSD, or hazily conspire to take down the establishment to a background of folk tunes, and then go out to bar where long past midnight some guy in a black suit tried to recruit you for a plastics corporation or the CIA. Or so he said, or so you remembered the next morning.

It was actually at one of these bars that I met my first real girlfriend, whom I'll call Edna. Edna wasn't a hippie, she was in town taking typing classes and working part-time as a receptionist, but like me she had become infatuated with the scene. Edna was only the second girl I'd slept with, and after a few months of going with her I started having trouble maintaining, then even getting, an erection. Back then it wasn't like it is now, when even polite people talk about erectile dysfunction and you can get medication to help with it. Back then there was nothing except a whole lot of embarrassment. At first, Edna and I thought it might be stress or lack of sleep causing my problem, then we suspected alcohol, but despite taking a fairly systematic approach and eliminating the possible causes one by one, we couldn't figure it out. Within weeks, my sex life just stopped. You can imagine how devastating that was to a young man.

Let's rewind a bit. About six months before meeting Edna, I had met a guy named Jerry in one of my political science classes and we'd quickly become friends. Jerry and I would regularly meet up, talk about everything from music and world revolution to UFOs, and generally goof off together, and he'd always have a decent supply of weed for us to smoke and Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to, which was fantastic. Although I've never had a truly best friend, Jerry was definitely my closest friend during my early student days in California, so he was the person I eventually turned to for help with my sexual problem. I remember that it was late at night after getting stoned immaculate, as Jim Morrison would say, that I told Jerry about my erectile dysfunction. He listened as I struggled mightily through the telling of it, and without laughing or making light of the situation told me not to worry too much, that it would probably go away on its own, but if I didn't want to wait and wanted help now, I should go see a man he referred to as Gerbil.

Gerbil was about ten years older than us, originally from New Mexico and had been studying chemistry at Berkeley until about a year prior, when he'd been expelled after being caught synthesizing hallucinogens in a school lab. Faced with the possibility of going back to New Mexico without a degree, Gerbil had decided to pursue the American Dream instead. He set up his own lab, kept his clientele, and expanded his operation. Drugs, incidentally, is how Jerry had first met Gerbil. And through Jerry is how I met the guy. That's one other unique thing about Gerbil: even compared to the regular paranoiacs, he was paranoid. You couldn't just see him. You had to be introduced by someone he trusted and he had to "vet" you, which included a brief interrogation and sitting silently while he "read your mind." My vetting lasted about half an hour. After it was over, Gerbil relaxed and I explained my problem to him. It was easy because he was like a magnet for deep truths. You wanted to tell him the embarrassing stuff. Long story short, he told me I was far from the first guy to be suffering from this type of condition and that he had a tried and tested solution.

I'll never forget the moment when he held out the pill bottle to me. His smiling, unshaven face, the sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, and the pills themselves, oblong and delicately off-white in their little glass home. When I asked how much I owed him, he shrugged and said that for a friend there was no cost, then laughed and added that he had more than enough money anyway. After all, he said, he was making truth serum for the CIA. "Just make sure you follow the instructions," he said. "And remember: you were never here."

When I got home, I read the instructions, which had been typed out on a strip of paper and taped to the outside of the pill bottle. They were simple enough but odd: Insert one (1) pill into urethra at least one hour prior to intercourse.

I'll spare you the awkward details of my first time doing the insertion. What you need to know is that the pills worked. God, how they worked! Never before, and never since, have I had an erection as hard and for as long as when I used those pills. In the past twenty years I've tried Viagra and all the others, but nothing even comes close. It was like fucking with the world's most sensitive steel rod, and you could go for hours!

Edna and I sure made up for lost time, but pretty soon Edna wasn't enough. We'd go at it two or three times, she'd call it quits for the night and I'd still be raging to go. I'm not proud of it now, but I started meeting other girls just for sex. Any girls who'd have me, really. At bars, meet ups, between classes, at concerts, everywhere. There was no emotional connection but physically it was bliss. I loved it, they loved it, and I guess later they dubbed it the Summer of Love.

I wish I'd counted how many pills Gerbil had given me, but I didn't. All I knew was that I was going through them like a knife through reheated butter. From what I remember, one pill was enough to last up to forty-eight hours, but I was using them almost non-stop, and the supply was depleting. I was probably addicted. It was after I'd used about half of my initial supply that Jerry asked over coffee one morning whether my "problem" had gone away. I told him it had and more than hinted at how my sex life had exploded, and he told me that was fantastic news. Then he lowered his voice and told me Gerbil wanted to meet up. I agreed, he told me the time and place, and I never saw Jerry again. But I'll get to that in a bit.

Gerbil and I met a few days later in what remained of a hangar on an abandoned airfield. It was beyond city limits, and Gerbil seemed to make a big deal of that fact. He told me he'd recently purchased the land way under value and was planning on building a bunker on it. Because that sounded like just the craziness he'd be into, I took him at his word. When I told him how well the pills had been working and that I wanted more of them, he wasn't surprised. He said he was thrilled and handed me another bottle of pills identical to the first. This time, however, they had a price. But it was the kind of price that wasn't paid in dollars and that made my horny young mind spin with possibilities. Gerbil was organizing a series of orgies and he was giving me the pills in exchange for taking part in them.

Back to Jerry: disappearing for a few days wasn't unusual. He went on benders from time to time during which he'd unreachable and absent from class, but those usually lasted a few days, after which he'd show up groggy and with stories to tell. After a week, I started to worry, but even then it's important to remember the times, both in terms of technology and perspective. We didn't have cell phones you could call anytime you wanted, and it wasn't unheard of for people to "drop out" of society. I had a professor who suddenly disappeared for half a semester, and when he came back he told us he'd gone on a walkabout. Still, I expected Jerry to tell me if he was planning something like that. He'd said nothing and now he was gone. I started asking around but realized I didn't actually know much about him. From what I gathered, he was still enrolled in university and still living at the same address. He just wasn't there.

My relationship with Edna was falling apart at the same time. I was bored with her, and she was getting bored with life in California. She was honest about wanting to move back East, and we both knew I wouldn't be going with her. And although she never said a word about it, I'm sure she knew I wasn't being faithful. Hell, even free love has a cost. I can't say we broke each other's hearts, but I will say that as I've aged, I've imagined more and more often what my life would had have been if we'd stayed together. I went on to love again but I never found a true love. Edna, especially in those early times, may have been the closest I ever got. Ironically, we loved each other most when we couldn't be physically intimate.

The first of Gerbil's orgies that I attended was held in the middle of the desert. There was music, drugs and absolutely no inhibitions. It was the most exciting experience of my life, and I loved it. Gerbil himself was never at the orgies, but almost everyone seemed to know him, at least by reputation. I don't remember how many orgies I ended up going to, but it was over a dozen, each in a different location with new women, many of them intoxicatingly exotic to me. Foreign students, bored housewives, groupies, intellectuals, stewardesses, and wanderers from all around the country and the world: India, Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, everywhere. I still have no idea how Gerbil organized these things or convinced so many women to go to them, but he did, and I must have fucked nearly all of them. The pills were my fuel.

Sometime during this hazy period of hedonistic pleasure, the police found Jerry's body in New Mexico. Apparently he'd hitchhiked all the way down there, spent a few weeks living on a ranch and overdosed on a cocktail of drugs so strong he must have been halfway to heaven by the time his organs failed. Foul play was ruled out, and no one in New Mexico cared if a longhaired hippie had killed himself accidentally or on purpose. There was no funeral as far as I know. About a week after Jerry's death, I received a letter from him in the mail. Judging by the gradual degradation of his handwriting, it had been written in several sittings. Most of it was personal and there was a lot of pain behind the words, but it was the last sentence that has stuck with me because of it's plain brutality. Four words: They've fucked us.

I fucked away my breakup with Edna and the loss of my friend. Orgy after orgy.

It was while sitting in a bar on a hot Wednesday night in the middle of July that I discovered something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I was down to my last pill and imagining the best way to take advantage of it, waiting for the perfect piece of ass to walk in through the door. I had a mug of beer in front of me, not my first, and I was absentmindedly walking the pill up and down the tops of my fingers, when suddenly I lost control and it fell straight into my mug. I must have been too drunk to react, because instead of fishing it out, I watched instead as it descended into the murky depths while giving off a spray of infinitely fine bubbles. I didn't know how a pill should react in beer, but something about this reaction seemed off. When it had settled at the bottom of the mug, the pill started shedding something other than bubbles: namely itself. Tiny pieces flaked off and floated to the top, and the pill began to tremble. Soon, dark spots became visible beneath the off-white colour of what I instinctively began to conceptualize as a shell, until the entire casing was gone, leaving only a trembling black insectous creature! Immediately I knew it was organic. Even more: alive! I watched mesmerized as it struggled in the liquid, scurrying towards the edge of the mug but unable to climb the glass sides. Finally, I put my fingers in and lifted it out. It was small but unbelievably hard between my fingertips. I couldn't crush it. I held it briefly against the overhead light, its body wholly opaque, before it slipped out, hit the unswept floor and scurried away. I scrambled after it, much to the cruel amusement of the other patrons, stomping forward on the floor before falling to my knees, but with no luck. It was gone. Returning to my seat, I thought, Just what the fuck have I been pushing into my urethra?

I had no pills and the only evidence of anything abnormal was my own boozy memory, so I had nothing. Except a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was horribly wrong. I tried contacting Gerbil in my usual ways, hoping to get more pills to experiment on and either put my mind at ease ("You hallucinated, idiot.") or get my hands on something I could send to a lab, but all my usual ways were indirect, like asking for permission to speak, and permission was being denied. Gerbil stopped responding. Eventually I grew desperate enough to visit the abandoned airfield, which was the only address of his I knew, but it was empty and unchanged. When I went to the land office and asked about ownership, the clerk told me the land belonged to a man named Beaconfield who was mostly likely long dead. Because I didn't know anyone other than Jerry who'd known Gerbil, I had nowhere else to turn. There's only so many times you can ask a stranger if they know a man named after a small rodent. Eventually you give up.

And so Gerbil was gone, my pills were gone, Jerry and Edna were gone, and soon the 1960s themselves were gone, metamorphosing into a sexless 1970s for me, then the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium. All as if someone had snapped their fingers. To say my life was dull would be an understatement. I had work, and followed it around the country, but I had little else. Forged at a time when we all wanted to remake the world, I had remade nothing and found myself leading a life of comfortable insignificance. But despite my memories fading, they never completely disappeared, and I spent many evenings wondering, trying to piece together clues, and always unable to shake those four words of Jerry's: They've fucked us. Was I scarred by a friend's suicide? Sure. But it was more than that, often in the form of sweat-inducing nightmares about tiny black insects crawling around my insides.

In the early 2000s, I saw a political ad for a candidate vying for the U.S. Senate. There was nothing unusual about the spot, but a few seconds caught my attention. They showed a series of photos of the candidate as he was growing up, attending school, graduating, etc. In one of them, he was with his mother, and my heart nearly stopped when I recognized her as Edna. I don't know what emotion I felt first, but I settled on hesitant happiness as I jumped online to confirm what my eyes had shown me. Although I didn't find the ad itself, I did find an interview with the candidate, including one with a gallery of photos, and in one of them was the confirmation I was searching for. Edna's face, older but still beautiful, stared at me from behind her son's electable smile. I was breathless. My happiness became joy. It was wonderful not only that Edna had done OK for herself but that she'd done extraordinarily, because it takes a certain kind of success to raise a future statesman.

On election night, I made popcorn, drank beer and cheered on Edna's son as if he were my own. Shortly after the polls closed, CNN projected him as the winner. For one night, my own insignificance didn't matter. I shared secretly in someone else's relevance.

A few months passed in the afterglow of this beautiful discovery. Sometimes I even had fantasies about contacting the senator to offer my congratulations, which would be a reconnection with Edna, but I always knew this was impossible. I was nobody to her, a shadow from the past. She probably didn't even remember me.

The reason why I mention this is two-fold: because I want to write and relive the happy moments, despite their way of decomposing into dread; and because Edna was merely the first of many. Over the next year, I recognized the faces of three other women I'd had sex with in California in the 1960s. I may not have known or recognized their names, but I do have a memory for faces and I was certain about theirs. All three were the mothers or grandmothers of successful people: a politician, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, and a lawyer. What are the chances?

Over the next months and years, I started to actively research the background of anyone who had recently attained a high level of success, or more accurately, a high level of influence: of power. Most were guarded about their pasts, many enigmatic, but some made public just enough of a thread of information for me to pull loose, and whether in photos or on video, what I kept finding were the faces of my former lovers, women I had met while cheating on Edna or, more often, women I'd fucked at Gerbil's orgies.

In time, I realized that the web extended beyond America. I found world leaders, generals, economists, industrialists and policy makers scattered about the globe, yet whose foremothers had all been in California with me! It was insane. I felt insane, wacko like the worst conspiracy nuts I'd met in the 1960s. Yet, just like them, I was convinced I was right, and what was right was too weird to be coincidence.

Today, the people whose mothers and grandmothers I fucked rule the world, and the singular way in which they are all working toward the same goals terrifies me to the very core of my being. To everyone else, they are unconnected individuals. To me, they are connected, and it gnaws at my mind, this question that I know I will never be able to answer: What are they and to whom do they owe their allegiance?

But I no longer search for them. I have accepted reality, and I don't know what difference it makes to know exactly how many of them exist. I still have no evidence. I can't go anywhere with a story relying on an old man's memory of his own LSD-fueled sexual exploits. I've tried, and gotten laughed out of the room. The best reaction is sympathy for being a senile old man whose mind is playing tricks on him about his past. And that's without mentioning my own theories involving parasites, mind control or aliens.

Yet those words: They've fucked us.

How I wish I had been able to hold on to that tiny black creature!

Or stopped myself from putting it in my body.

But I couldn't and now I'm here, posting my story somewhere at least a few people will read it. Maybe you'll believe me, maybe you won't. I don't know if I want to give a warning or a confession, but either way I've done it now. What finds its way to the internet stays on the internet.

I hope for your collective sake that when you find this years later, you'll be able to have a good laugh.

I know I'm not laughing.

I truly believe that in the 1960s I participated in something whose conclusion will be the ruin of mankind.


	24. The Circular Logic of Space Exploration

Appleton rushed to scratch the message onto the back cover of a magazine lying face-down on a table near the telephone. Scratch—because the pen didn’t want to cooperate; the ballpoint stuck. Appleton’s fingers shook.

It was a prank, surely. The conversation had been recorded. He would end up on a website somewhere, the anonymous out-of-touch butt of some teenager’s joke.

Yet there was something in the quality of that voice, a voice that didn’t belong to any teenager, that forced the shapes of the letters through his wrist, onto the paper. Even as he felt the fool, he also felt the chronicler. The words could be historic.

The words: after a plain “hello” the voice had excused itself and muttered something about a wrong number and galactic interference. Then it had said, exactly, “No matter, you will have to do. My name is Charles R—and I am calling from Mars. First, record the date and time of this communication. Second, please bring it to the attention of one Mrs Mary Clare of 34 Wentworth St, Nottingham. Pass along also that I am doing fine and that, though food is scarce, I have had my fill, and that water is plenty once one digs past the red surface of things.”

That was all. Then the phone went dead. The connection had not been good to begin with, but there was no doubt about any of it. Nothing had been made up. There was no uncertainty.

Having written these five sentences, Appleton let go of the pen, wiped his forehead and retreated to the safety of his customary evening chair. It was a few minutes after six—his regular reading time—but Appleton gave no thought to books. Today, he sat silently in his chair until the clock struck seven. His neurons fired incessantly.

By eight, he had made up his mind: in the morning he would fly to Nottingham and personally deliver the message to Mary Clare.

There was only the slight problem of the wife.

She would arrive home tomorrow afternoon and find it empty. She would worry. Appleton’s greatest fear was that the wife would worry. She was of good breeding and delicate constitution, and worry might weaken her system enough to allow otherwise harmless bacteria to set up residence, which would lead to complications and eventually a prolonged bedridden death. He shuddered at the mere inkling. Right, he would have to compose a note: “My dear, I am off on a scholarly pursuit. Do not worry. I will return by Wednesday. Sincerely, your devoted husband.”

He folded the note and placed it on the dining room table. That, he realized, was more writing than he’d done since his tenure at Oxford. He felt productive again.

## \- - -

The plane skidded as it touched down, but the flight was otherwise without incident. Outside, grey clouds produced a cold mist that collected drops of water on the brim of Appleton’s hat as he waited by the terminal. Although no one could say so by looking at him, he was nervous.

He nearly misspoke while telling the driver the address. In the taxi, he caught himself rubbing his thumb compulsively against his forefinger like he hadn’t done since his rugby days.

## \- - -

The house at 34 Wentworth St was made of pale yellow brick. It was smaller and set farther from the road than neighbouring houses. A stone path led to the front door, on either side of which bloomed a well-kempt garden. Appleton walked the path slowly, cherishing the smell of wet flowers and realizing that over the last twelve hours he’d developed a particular mental image of Mary Clare. It was something like the opposite of the wife.

He stood for a few moments before the front door and deliberated whether to ring the electronic bell or use the bronze knocker. Eventually, he rapped his knuckles against the wood. A woman opened the door.

“Yes, hello,” said Appleton.

The woman looked suspiciously at his hands, but he wasn’t carrying anything except the back cover of the magazine on which he’d written the message from Mars.

“I’m not selling,” he said. “I’m looking for Mrs Mary Clare. I’ve been informed that she lives at this address. I have a message for her from Charles R—.”

“Did he send you, the scoundrel?”

Appleton blinked.

“Well did he or didn’t he, speak up. All these years and he can’t even come back to show his face, sends some other poor fool.” Her eyes studied Appleton’s hat. “Or maybe he’s dead. Maybe that’s what you come to tell me. Last of kin or some such.”

“No, Mrs Clare—“

“Simpson, but one and the same as you’re looking for.”

“Mrs Simpson.” Appleton fumbled the correction. He’d shoved one hand into a cloak pocket and was furiously rubbing his fingers together. “Yesterday evening I received a phone call. I wasn’t meant to receive it, you see, there was a mistake with the connection. The call was from Mr Charles R—. He asked that I deliver this message.”

Appleton read aloud what he’d written on the magazine cover.

The woman laughed and stomped her foot. She was in her sixties, Appleton realized. Sections of her hair were greying. The lines under her eyes were deep and permanent. Her laughter was not a joyous laughter.

She said, “Whatever trick it is you’re playing, and whoever you’re playing it with, I’m too old for it, you understand? The past is dead. Mr Charles R— is dead. And I deserve to be left to my own peace. Don’t come back here.”

But before she could close the door, Appleton put his hand on her shoulder. It was a soft shoulder. Appleton gasped. Never had he been so forward with a woman.

“Please, Mr Charles R— is not dead. I spoke to him. I heard his voice. I’m telling you the truth. He’s alive. He’s just on another planet. It’s utterly remarkable!”

Mrs Simpson looked at Appleton with suddenly sympathetic eyes and, even as she removed his hand from her shoulder, kept her voice calm:

“He’s dead to me.”

Appleton’s hand fell limply against the side of his cloak.

“There are certain things you do that, once you do them, their consequences are permanent. There is no pretending and there is no coming back. Take care now, Mister.”

With that, she shut the door.

## \- - -

Upon returning home, Appleton’s life returned to normal—at least in all superficial respects: he smiled to his wife, he kept to himself, and, at Six O’clock each evening, he retreated to his customary chair to read his customary books. The magazine cover on which he’d written the message from Charles R—, he placed in a private drawer in the desk in his study, underneath unfinished essays and research into particle acceleration and magnet engine propulsion and other old academic bric-a-brac.

For weeks, whilst trying unsuccessfully to locate more information about Charles R—, he kept the drawer unlocked. But, once he’d given up hope, he turned the key and, with one click, banished all thought of Mars from his mind.

Or at least that’s what Appleton intended. For there are certain neurons that, once they start firing, are impossible to stop. At most, they can be slowed—their work delayed. They are not obtrusive neurons: they do not prevent, say, smiling to one’s wife or reading customary books. But they are persistent and every so often they make the results of their operation known. This happens most-of-all at unexpected times, as, for instance, when Appleton, having bent to retrieve a particularly large pine cone from the grass, stood up with the complete schematic for the Magna-IV Engine before his eyes, or, upon having been asked by the local lady grocer for his opinion about a recent stretch of fair weather, replied, “My God, Ruthenium!”

Once such ideas made themselves known to Appleton, he began putting them to paper. Once they were on paper, he tasked other, more compliant, neurons with dividing and conquering any problems that the papers made apparent; and, once those had been solved, what else was there to do but gather the necessary materials and construct the first prototypes?

Appleton kept mum about this, of course. To his physicist colleagues, he was still at work on the same book he’d been working on for the last decade. He was still irrelevant. The wife, as long he smiled to her, suspected nothing. It was only his books that could have given him away—lying unopened on their shelves, their regular Six O’clock appointments long forgotten, their yellowing pages gathering dust—but books by themselves cannot speak. Appleton’s secret was safe.

Even as the project approached completion, not one soul suspected.

When launch-day finally dawned and Appleton, having composed a note to his wife indicating that he would be away until Wednesday on a scholarly pursuit, packed the pieces and prototypes into the back of a rented truck and drove to an old farmer’s field, from where he would blast off that very noon, the whole world was still naïve to the history that would soon be made.

In the field, Appleton worked diligently. He filled the shell of the rocket with each of the separate machines he had designed and constructed. He had a life support system, a navigation system, a communications system. He had propulsion. He had fuel. He had everything that was necessary. Nothing had been overlooked. As the sun rose, it rose on years of endless effort that, today, had physically and for the first time come together in the middle of such a previously insignificant English spot on Earth.

By Ten O’clock, the rocket was nearly complete. All that was left was the installation of the final ingenious detail: the captain’s seat: Appleton’s own customary evening chair.

That done, Appleton looked for one last time at the earthly sky, its thin clouds moving slightly across an orange sun, then climbed into the rocket and closed the hatch. The pneumatics sighed. The inside air was warm. As he set the navigation, every click and beep audible as if within his own skull, Appleton wondered what became of Mary Simpson. But just as it had come, the wonder passed. He confirmed his intended destination on the small liquid crystal display and took a deep breath.

The destination was unbelievable: Appleton felt feverish. He maneuvered into his chair and strapped himself in. Space was tight but he was not uncomfortable. Besides—he thrust a needle into a vein in his arm—he would be asleep for most of the journey. The sedative began to flow. He activated the countdown sequence. When he awoke, he would already be in Saturn’s orbit.

## \- - -

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

The communications equipment produced only a monotonous hiss punctuated by crackles. Appleton scratched his head. He’d programmed the system to link directly to the telephone in his home. The signal was strong enough. It should be working. He tried another connection.

This time, there was a faint click and the echo of a voice.

“Darling! It’s me. Please say something,” Appleton spoke into the receiver.

The voice wobbled.

“I hope you can hear me. I hope you haven’t been worrying. I hope I haven’t caused you harm. Please, darling, say something so that I know there isn’t a malfunction.”

The echoing voice suddenly came into rather clear focus. “Who is this? And do you want to speak with my mum?”

Appleton knew right away that it wasn’t the voice of the wife. In fact, it wasn’t even a female voice. It was the voice of a boy.

“My name is Appleton,” said Appleton. “I am attempting to contact the wife. Unfortunately, I may have miscalculated. Nonetheless, if you’d be a good lad and please make a note of the following: I am calling from Titan, which is the largest moon of the plane—

“Saturn, I know. I’m not stupid.”

Appleton cleared his throat and adjusted his headset. “Yes, that’s mighty good of you. As I was saying, I am on Titan, having only just arrived, you see. But the situation thus far appears manageable. I predict I shall make a fair go of living here.” He remembered his reason for calling. “Right, then, if you could tell as much to the wife, whom you will find living at 11 Golden Pheasant Lane in Beaconsfield, I would be much obliged. Her name is—“

The connection went dead. The communications system went offline. Try as Appleton might, no amount of banging, prodding and reprogramming ever brought it back.

## \- - -

Phil Jones replaced the telephone receiver.

“Who was that?” his mother asked.

Then disappeared down the hall without waiting for an answer.

Phil went back to the homework spread out on his bedroom floor, whose doing Appleton had interrupted. Geography lay beside history, which bordered an island of English. Phil tried all three subjects—cross his innocent heart, he did—but all at once the history was too boring, the English too imprecise and the geography too much pointless memorisation. He rubbed his eyes. Next year he’d be in high school. The homework would only get harder.

T-I-T-A-N

He typed the letters almost absent-mindedly into a Google image search.

The moon stared at him.

Somewhere inside his head, certain neurons were beginning to fire.


	25. The Skull Cauldron

After the incipient nights of necromancy, Death incarnate prowled the world like a rotting, rag-covered plague dog, dragging his corroded scythe and leaving the mark of an ever-expanding spiral originating in the terrestrial hell hole at the heart of the city cemetery.

He crept weakly, his tall, thin body nearly parallel to the ground, leaving behind him permanent night and the putrid winds of decay, and when he found his victim—a woman walking home alone, a widower rocking sadly on his porch, a child left momentarily unattended—he killed and feasted, the victim's raw flesh granting him sufficient vitality to spread the webbed cartilage of his wings and, carrying the carcass in his talons, soar triumphantly across the moonlit sky, back to the cemetery, where his growing horde of undead minions waited, gathering around the skull cauldron.

When he landed on the soft grass, a hush fell over them and they ebbed to make way for him, who had granted them re-life and to whom they owed their soulless but thirsty allegiance. With dull but feverish eyes they watched in silence the spectacle unfold.

Skull cauldron: the once-head of a colossal beast larger and more ancient than any known to man, long ago obscured by the folds of time and now but a fantastic monument arising twenty feet into the air and measuring the same across—a gruesome relic of a time too horrible to remember, and a reminder that while revolutions may eat their children, evolution absolutely devours its bastard freaks.

Death dragged the victim's carcass up the narrow steps he had chiseled into the cauldron's occiput, leaving a trail of fresh blood which the minions lapped up greedily with their grey tongues, before depositing the warm meat into a cavity especially prepared for the purpose.

The carcass slid into darkness.

The grinding, _crack_ and _pop_ of calcified gears—

Death embraced the skull cauldron; his wings covered its immensely empty sockets.

The squish—

The hideous stench—

As its mechanisms worked, breaking down and transmogrifying the human raw material, the skull cauldron heated, and the heat caused its massive jaws to inch open, and through that opening crawled the newborn ground-meat worms that Death was sending forth to fertilize the Earth's soil with pestilence and despair!

The fat pink worms squirmed, bubbling like intestines filled with bloody swamp water.

And the undead minions grabbed at them, shoved them greedily into their mouths, still stupidly following the feeding instinct of the living, and Death watched with amusement as the worms worked their way through the derelict bodies before escaping through some decaying hole or orifice before continuing on their journey.

Death next dismounted the skull cauldron, and with remaining vitality incanted another cohort of minions. 

Their limbs burst through the ground—

Then Death rested.

He had again expanded his kingdom. The spiral grew outward, the minions increased in number, the meat worms carried their demonic blight beneath unsuspecting humanity. The process had started, and its result was irrevocable.


	26. Head / Cave

I agreed to care for my sister's children for five days while she and her husband vacationed in Australia. My sister has always been a hard worker; she deserved her time off. “They’ll be fine,” I overheard her tell him. “He’s just a little neurotic.”

I tracked their flight online.

I followed the schedule and instructions they’d provided.

But five days became seven, then ten, and the children required constant attention and entertainment, allowing me no breaks during which to concentrate on my work. Expectation birthed anxiety, which brought a crushing end to my normally clockwork sleep cycle.

I took to walking after the children dozed.

I took a knife for safety.

One sleepless night, I wandered out into the cold, dark winter, rejoicing in the childless solitude, if for a mere half-hour, watching the falling snow fill the streetlight illumination like so much static, losing myself for so long I gasped when she approached: an ancient woman I’d never seen, strolling as alone at night as I. “Beware,” she said—passing, “the black ice.”

I fell.

My head slammed against concrete.

I got home in a state.

There was blood in my ears and a terrible throbbing behind my eyes, and as the children slept I scoured the basement for my first aid kit.

As I neared a certain section of the wall, the throbbing increased.

I noticed a crack.

I kicked the wall and it crumbled.

I ran upstairs and grabbed my torch and my pickaxe, both awoken and screaming.

With the pickaxe I destroyed what remained of the fraudulent wall.

Emptiness:

I stepped inside and ignited the torch.

The depth was endless.

A secret underground labyrinth.

But after weeks of dark travel, the subterrain became soft and organic, terminating in a fleshy loam and what appeared to be monstrous jaws. As I neared the exit, holding tightly my burning torch _I noticed a flickering light begin to emanate from my irritated throat._

The ground shifted beneath my feet. 

_Attempting to move, I discovered myself restrained, bound to a white-sheeted bed by leather straps around my wrists, ankles and forehead._

I stepped forward, from warmth into a chilled and sterile air.

_A tiny human crawled out of my mouth._

I looked about the giant world. Behind me loomed a giant human head!

 _It was me_ / It was me.

 _I_ s _t_ h _i_ s _m_ a _d_ n _e_ s _s_? _I_ t _h_ o _u_ g _h_ t.

_I calmed myself._

Climbing up my own face, I determined I was in an asylum.

 _"The straps," I thought_ / I heard myself think.

I took out my knife and cut the strap restraining my forehead. It was thick but I managed. Next I freed my wrists and ankles and _finally I stood again!_

_I put on a white coat hanging nearby, and carefully picked myself up and placed myself into the coat's breast pocket._

I was carried by a god.

_Together, I and I escaped the asylum._


	27. The three of us went hiking in Uganda, and deep within the jungles I found my calling

"We'll let you know in a few weeks," the interviewer said.

He had a nice plastic smile, and I flashed my own in response. The truth was I'd bombed another one, and further unemployment beckoned. _You need a job to get job experience, which is required to get a job._ He shook my hand, wished me luck, and ushered me to a pair of impeccably clean glass doors, through which the harsh light of midday poured in, reminding me that I was a failure as an adult. Real adults weren't supposed to be idle at this time of day. I stepped outside into a spotlight of inferiority.

A car honked.

It was my girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancée, Jen. The plan was I'd propose as soon as I found a steady job. These days, any job would do.

I shrugged as I got in to ward off any lurking questions. "They'll tell me in a few days," I said.

"You'll get it eventually."

"Yeah."

"You have a degree in management, you're tall, you're good with people—"

"Yeah," I repeated.

Maybe in another eight months I can find a job cleaning glass doors, I thought.

She kissed me and hit the gas.

Although I tried not to admit it, I was increasingly jealous of Jen, with her bachelor's in biology, Masters in primatology, and looming years of scholarship-funded doctoral studies. Her life seemed set. She was happy, and the only question left about her future was for how long she would choose to put up with a loser like me.

"Up for lunch?" Jen asked, interrupting my train of self-loathing.

The question seemed innocent so I knew it wasn't. She was planning something.

"Sure."

"Great! I told Marcus we'd meet him at The Brass Arrow." She bit her lower lip and glanced over at me. "There's something I want to propose."

I sank into the passenger's seat.

The last lingering lunch eaters were filtering out of the pub when we arrived, which made it easy to spot Marcus waiting in a booth by the window.

Marcus was a friend Jen had made as an undergrad, and he'd kind of become our common friend over time. _Kind of_ because I'd always suspected he was in love with Jen, and on my worse days it didn't take much to imagine the pair of them running off together. Marcus, after all, had a job.

After the normal niceties Jen made her pitch:

"I was thinking," she started, "that now might be the last time the three of us could take a trip together. I start at Columbia in September, Marcus has that promotion that likely means no vacation for a while, and—" She looked at me, hesitating for a painful second."—once you find your job, you'll find it hard to get away."

I nodded.

She produced an atlas and plopped it open on the table.

"So I propose we go on an adventure, see the world, experience a foreign land…"

She rifled through the pages, blitzing through South America and Europe, before slowing down on Africa, until she found the exact spot she was looking for and declared, "And I was thinking specifically of here!"

She pointed to Uganda.

"Huh," Marcus said. "Not really a big tourist destination."

"Exactly! What do you think?" she asked me.

I thought I wouldn't have known where Uganda was if not for the atlas in front of me. "Could be interesting," I said, to say anything.

She could sense my hesitation. "If you don't want to go, I totally understand. Backpacking in Africa is not for everyone."

_Backpacking?!_

She went on: "And Marcus and I could always go by ourselves. Right, Marcus?"

We both looked at him.

"Of course."

Did I want to go backpacking in Uganda? No. Was I going to let my hopefully-wife go backpacking in Uganda with a guy who was in love with her? Not a chance!

"Oh, I'm in," I said.

"Great!"

# \- - -

We landed at Entebbe International Airport on a rainy afternoon and proceeded by shuttle to Kampala, where we checked into a downtown hostel run by a Brazilian named Santos, before heading out into the colourful chaos of the city's nightlife on _boda-boda_ motorcycle taxis whose drivers didn't wear helmets and drove like madmen, to experience the local culture and cuisine.

As we sped along the street, winding dangerously between cars and people, the warm wind on my face felt like the stripping away of jet lag and civilization. To my American sensibilities, Uganda was from the very beginning raw and honest, like an unwaxed, misshapen fruit: visually unappealing but absolutely delicious. And as the city passed me by, a glowing panorama, I wanted to sink my teeth into it and bite down until the juices ran down my chin.

This was the opposite reaction to Marcus, who found the place "dull, dirty and disgusting."

Jen wanted only to leave the city behind and head for the mountains.

In the end, we spent three days in Kampala before venturing out. On our last night, Santos treated us to drinks and a conversation that would change our lives forever.

After inviting us to the hostel bar, a permanently dusky room smelling of fried sausage and alcohol, he poured us four shots of hooch, reclined in his personal armchair and, staring at the homemade bottle lights dangling from the ceiling, asked us about our plans.

"Kibale National Park for some hiking and gorilla or chimpanzee trekking," Jen answered.

Santos downed his drink.

I followed suit, though it nearly burned a hole in my throat.

"Kibale is _nice_ ," Santos said.

"That's what I've read too," I said, mostly to check if my voice still worked.

It hoarsely did.

"What do you mean _nice_?" Jen asked.

"I mean it's a nice place to visit. Safe, family friendly." There was definitely a note of derision in his tone. "It's just that…"

The unfinished sentence hung enticingly in the air.

"Just that what?"

Santos looked at the three of us in turn, then leaned forward in his armchair. "Just that the three of you don't seem like tourists. More like travellers, and travellers wouldn't waste their time on Kibale. There are far more memorable places to go hiking in Uganda."

He held out the bottle of hooch. "Interested?"

We held out our glasses.

"Tell us about some of these memorable places," Jen said.

Over the next hour, Santos weaved a mystical tapestry of adventure, wilderness and self-discovery, gleaned largely from tales told to him by friends and former hostel clientele. To our booze-softened minds, it was pure magic. Uganda was already exotic, but in its furthermost corners it sounded downright otherworldly. Even the place names were evocative: Heaven's Cylinder, Greenwhisker, The Mane. "The only place I would caution against is Runside," he finished.

A soft breeze whispered through the hanging bottle lamps.

"What's wrong with Runside?" Jen asked. Her eyes were torches and I knew Kibale was already a forgotten memory.

"There have been rumblings about—"

"Guerillas?"

"Demons."

Jen laughed. "Folklore is fascinating," she said,"but I'm a scientist, so you'll have to excuse my skepticism. I'm afraid of machine guns, not so much of evil spirits. Is there anything else wrong with Runside?"

By now, I knew nothing could dissuade her.

"You may have trouble finding a guide willing to go," Santos said.

Jen pulled out a stack of American dollars.

Santos put down his bottle. "On the other hand, willingness is a relative concept. I am sure I could find someone as scientifically minded as yourself."

"Or we could all go to Kibale like we planned," Marcus suddenly piped up. He'd been silent for most of the evening.

"Scared of demons?" Jen teased.

"More like I don't think it's wise to hike to the middle of nowhere in a foreign country when there's a perfectly good national park instead."

We decided to vote.

Jen was for the demons in Runside, Marcus wanted to stick to the family friendly plan of Kibale, so the deciding vote fell to me, and despite my own preference for staying in a non-hiking capacity in Kampala, in the end I couldn't pass up the chance not only to support Jen over Marcus but to do so while highlighting his cowardice.

"Runside," I said.

Jen kissed me, Marcus shook his head, and Santos greedily counted his American money.

"I love you," she whispered in my ear.

"I love you too," I said back.

"I'll have a guide for you by tomorrow," said Santos.

# \- - -

Santos was true to his word. Our guide's name was Mukisa, he was a former soldier, and we were to meet him in a village several hundred kilometres outside of Kampala.

We rode to the village by bus.

Not an air-conditioned, roomy tourist bus but a cramped, humid and smelly one meant for the locals. The ride was uncomfortable and the vehicle seemed to lack shock absorbers, but we did feel an unbridled glee. If we wanted an adventure, we were certainly getting one.

We got off to the sight of two dusty roads, a few rundown buildings and children playing in the dirt.

Mukisa met us in the town office, which also housed a schoolroom and what might have been a museum, although its only exhibit was what to my layman's eyes appeared to be a small gorilla skeleton, but which Jen emphatically told me was a chimpanzee.

Mukisa wasn't one for chatting.

He was tall, thin and stern, and despite wearing civilian clothes still had the impeccable posture and demeanour of a soldier. Although he spoke English fluently, he usually chose not to use it, and his communications with us were short and functional:

"Put your belongings in the vehicle. We are already behind schedule."

_The vehicle_ was Mukisa's old Jeep, into which we piled as snuggly as our backpacks, and within minutes left the last vestiges of society behind.

We drove along a hard-packed dirt road, through grassy plains, skirting lush jungle and towards the permanently looming mountains, which seemed perpetually out of reach.

Mukisa spoke Swahili over the radio but was otherwise silent. The rest of us chatted until the landscape awed and overwhelmed us. We ate snacks, took pictures, listened to music on our phones.

Somewhere along the way we left the dirt road behind.

As darkness began to creep up on us, Mukisa brought the Jeep to a standstill and we made camp for the night. Mukisa had his own tent; we had another, a three-person. Before going to sleep, the four of us ate a communal supper as the sun sank behind the blue mountains, turning them black.

When she had finished eating, Jen asked Mukisa about the demons in Runside.

"Maybe that's not the best topic of conversation," Marcus suggested.

Birds took flight in the distance.

"Not demons," Mukisa said. "Lost spirits of the dead warriors."

I didn't sleep well.

Mukisa woke us before daybreak, and I was relieved despite feeling like my mind was wrapped in cotton balls.

The sounds of the wilderness coming to life in the dawn light gave me goosebumps, but Mukisa paid them no mind so I pretended to do the same. Still, I was thankful he had a rifle.

Jen was bouncy and excited, squinting at a map she had opened on the Jeep's hood while coolly tracing our route with the sharpened point of her favourite knife. "We should be there by late afternoon."

Mukisa hurried us along.

When I went off to take a piss, I heard Marcus telling Jen it wasn't too late to turn back.

I felt I could turn that to my advantage, so as I climbed into the Jeep I said, "I am thrilled we decided to do this. It's amazing out here. I feel absolutely alive! You had the best vacation idea ever."

I kissed Jen on the cheek, she kissed me on the lips, Marcus shook his head while putting on headphones, and all was right in the world.

The Jeep rolled us away toward the mountains.

# \- - -

Jen's prediction was right, and by late afternoon we reached the foothills. Mukisa parked his Jeep, we took down our backpacks, and he retrieved his own rifle and supplies before emphatically throwing a camouflaging tarp over the vehicle. "Time to proceed on foot," he said.

Jen helped me fasten my backpack.

I re-tied my boots.

Marcus watched us as if for a sign that everything was a prank, that any second now we would burst out laughing, pat him on the back, throw our stuff into the Jeep and call it a day.

"We must go," Mukisa said.

The jungle ahead looked moist, verdant and enticing. It was like staring into a jewel—albeit one held firmly in nature's open, drooling maw.

"Wow," I said.

But for the first time, I was scared enough to consider that Marcus may have been right. Maybe this was a little crazy _and a little unnecessarily dangerous_. The thought that kept me from saying anything was the embarrassment of having objectively the least to lose. How could I tell Jen we should retreat when she was the one risking an _actual_ future?

In the end, I convinced myself it was merely the first glimpse of untamed wilderness that had increased my heart rate and made my legs rubbery.

You can read all the guidebooks you want, but reality is still a sucker punch to the nose.

We went hiking.

Mukisa's plan was to hike several hours in, make camp and start the true adventure tomorrow.

Everything went accordingly until nightfall.

# \- - -

I'm not sure if I awoke first, but within seconds I was aware of cold sweat gathering on the nape of my neck, of holding my breath and feeling both Jen and Marcus stirring claustrophobically beside me in the three-person tent, which felt significantly less like shelter and more like a burlap sack we'd gotten ourselves trapped in—beyond whose synthetic skin the jungle _creaked_ and _moaned_ and _rustled_ in the windless, imagined dark...

"Did you hear that?" I whispered.

I felt their breathing warm and irregular on my skin.

"Yeah. The fuck…"

"Is that like _normal jungle sounds_?" I asked Jen.

"I… think so," she answered.

Mukisa's tent was close to ours, but of course we couldn't see it. We couldn't see anything.

"Animals?"

"Many here are nocturnal. We're just not used to them," Jen said, before beginning to list them like some kind of nervous encyclopedia.

_Something fluttered past._

Jen stopped.

"So should we stay in here and _like_ try to go back to sleep?" Marcus asked.

"Definitely."

"If anything was wrong, Mukisa would come get us?" I asked.

"He's just out there," Marcus said.

"Definitely."

The sounds subsided, before coalescing distantly into repetition: _emin-idi… emin-idi… emin-idi_...

"And that's just a birdcall," I said or asked as I felt simultaneously the need to pee and to get the hell out of that tent and out of the jungle!

Marcus lunged forward.

But Jen grabbed him by the arm. "Mukisa," he choked out.

_emin-idi… emin-idi…_

"It's animals and you're safe in here," she asserted with unexpected confidence. "Going out into the darkness would be the worst thing to do."

The repetition faded to silence.

I stayed put too, and that's how we spent our first night in the jungle, like little kids camping for the first time, their imaginations making nightmares out of the unseen and unfamiliar. But we didn't dare exit the tent until the rising sun had tapped comfortingly on the walls, after which we crawled one by one out into pale daylight to see:

Mukisa's tent was gone!

"Well _fuck_."

We stood, scanning the land around us. No tracks, no signs of struggle. Quite peaceful if you didn't find the situation as pregnant with menace as I did.

"Best case scenario—"

"He screwed us out of our money, turned tail and drove home," Marcus said. "Leaving us alone in the mountains without a way of getting back to civilization."

"Worst case scenario: demons," I added.

Jen shot me a look. "We just need to find our way back to the foothills, then go from there."

"We should check for the Jeep," Marcus said.

"Like he just decided to walk back?"

"I meant in case something got him at night _and he's dead_."

"Seriously?" Jen asked. "Nothing _got_ anyone. No one died. Someone happened to strand us here alone. That's our problem, and it's enough of one. Not any kind of demon."

"Mukisa had our maps," I said.

"And our compass."

Jen planted her hands on her hips. "Do either of you remember from which direction we hiked here?"

"Sorry," Marcus said, "but I kind of decided to put my trust in the _guide we hired_."

"There's a compass on my phone," I chipped in.

"See," Jen said, still boring holes deep into Marcus' soul with her beautiful brown eyes. "Now _that's_ the kind of practical thinking we need.”

"Amazing how it hasn't translated into stable employment."

"Oh, fuck you!" I yelled.

We sat and simmered, drank purified water and set out based on my phone's compass in what should have been the right direction, but after several hours of walking in terrain that none of us recognized, we decided we were going the wrong way. As Marcus helpfully pointed out, we seemed to be going up- rather than down-hill, which meant we were heading deeper into the jungle.

"According to the compass it's the right direction," I said while rotating with my phone in-hand.

"When's the last time you calibrated it?"

"Calibrated?"

"Idiot."

"Guys! Stop it," Jen said. "You're both fully grown men. One of you please use your natural sense of orientation and find us a way out of here."

Marcus turned to face her. "Are you being _un_ ironic? Because as far as I remember, _you_ wanted to go on this trip, _you_ wanted to come here, and _you're_ the one getting a PhD in jungle _fucking_ studies."

I failed at avoiding Jen's gaze.

"That's funny. Because as I remember, everything about this was a mutual decision," she said. "And I'm an academic. I study primates. I'm not a survivalist."

I nodded.

In the brightness of day, being lost in the wild didn't seem quite as bad as not-being-lost at night. The landscape didn't seem like it was out to kill you.

Marcus trudged off ahead—

And screamed!

"Oh sh-it! Ohshit! Oh... _shit!_ Oh shit!"

Jen and I ran to him, and almost immediately I saw what had caused his eyes to bulge.

Jen put a hand to her mouth to keep from retching.

Lying on the ground in front of Marcus was an arm: long, muscled, and still clutching the handle of a machete. Flies buzzed nearby. Where the arm should have been attached to the shoulder, however, there was but a single clean cut, revealing a small circle of white bone surrounded by a mass of pink flesh.

The arm looked freshly lopped off.

We backed away.

I tried to hear if there was any danger _over the sound of my beating heart._

All I heard were the flies and the general hum of the jungle.

"Do you think that's _his_?" Marcus asked.

"It's not Mukisa," Jen said.

"How do you—"

"It's _not_!"

"I don't think this is the right direction," I said. "I think I should calibrate my compass…"

"I don't know about you two, but I am really starting to freak out right now and I _really_ want to be back in America."

"Stay calm. This could be innocent," Jen said.

" _Innocent_? In what deranged fucking world is a dead man's arm holding a fucking sword in the middle of the fucking jungle innocent?"

"I don't see the rest of him," I said.

Jen leaned her body against mine and I could feel her shaking. "Different customs," she said weakly.

"Right."

That's when I heard the chanting again:

Faintly:

_emin-idi… emin-idi…_

"Did you guys hear that?" I asked.

"No," said Marcus, stepping carefully towards the corpse arm, before nudging it with the toe of his boot—

"What are you doing?"

He stepped on the dead palm, applying pressure, making the most disgusting sounds. "Trying to get the sword loose so that we have a weapon."

It didn't work, so he crouched down and pried the machete loose with his hands.

"There!"

He waved the machete around.

Blood stained it's blade.

"Now let's please get the hell out of here," I said.

But a half day's worth of hiking brought us no closer to a way out. My phone was apparently shit, Jen and Marcus had drained their batteries listening to music on the Jeep ride out here, and I couldn't stop hearing that chant, over and over and over like a song stuck in my head, and I prayed that's all it was: in my head. But mine certainly weren't the only nerves fraying at the prospect of spending another night in the jungle, this time knowingly alone, without a rifle, without a solution to what was becoming an existential problem.

As if to make things worse, the evening sky clouded over, plunging us into a pre-darkness gloom that only underlined our unenviable options: make camp for the night or continue hiking in what very well could be circles upon circles.

"Enough. We need to stop, find a place to sleep and get some rest," I said.

"And then what?"

The first drops of rain delayed the answer, and we worked quickly to pitch our tent and at least stay dry. Inside, the rain drummed. We sat as far away from each other without touching the sides of the tent as possible.

"I love you," I told Jen.

"Jesus, not now."

On one hand, it was comforting to be cordoned off from the wilderness, able to pretend we were safe in somebody's backyard. On the other hand, we weren't five years old and knew our lives were truly in danger.

Night came.

_emin-idi… emin-idi… emin-idi…_

"You sure you guys don't hear that?" I asked.

Marcus held his breath for a few seconds. "I can most definitely hear something," he said.

"Birds," Jen said.

Marcus clutched his machete.

"You know, I would really like to believe you," I said to Jen, "but that does not sound like birds to me."

"I suppose you're an ornithologist now."

The chanting grew louder, as if amplified by the pounding rain. _Birds, birds, birds,_ I kept telling myself in a mental counter-chant.

Marcus was sitting with his knees up against his chest and playing with his dead man's blade, running his fingers up and down, up and down…

_Birds, birds, birds_ —

Something brushed up against the tent.

_emin-idi…_

Jen crawled toward me, grabbed my hand with hers _and squeezed!_

"Oh _fuck_ this _shit_!"

Marcus sprung toward the tent entrance—ripped it open:

The rain roared.

And the darkness stared at us like a sponge that had sucked up all light and human existence.

Marcus screamed, disappearing head-long into it—

_Swallowed._

"We have to go after him!" I yelled over the noise.

Jen wouldn't let go of my hand.

I pulled her behind me.

—out: into the descending sheets of torrential water, soaking me in seconds in the absolute black of night: the unfathomable volume of nothingness!

"Marcus!"

_emin-idi… emin-idi… emin-idi…_

But even in the total dark, I was aware of _things_ moving out there. _Circling, stalking_. I pulled Jen; we ambled blindly forward through the slick vegetation. _Pressing_. Across the greedy muddy ground. "Marcus!"

And I realized—

_emin-idi… emin idi… amin idi… idi amin…_

becoming:

_Idi Amin… Idi Amin…_

I felt the shocking warmth of flesh and instinctively I leapt away—

The _thump_ of blade finding wood.

"Jen!"

She was alive.

I felt her scrambling frantically away, as above me Marcus struggled to dislodge his machete from a tree trunk.

"There's something out there!"

Shapes—motions—

Flitted past.

Inhuman velocities in the near and far distances.

Screeching, and that hideous chanting—monotonous and overpowering the drumming of the rain—enclosing us…

_Idi Amin! Idi Amin! Idi Amin!_

"I'm going to die," Jen sobbed. "We're all going to die!"

Marcus swung madly at the threat weaving in and out of the unknown.

_Metal cleaving air._

_Sobbing._

And the first hairy arm reaching towards us!

_Metal embedding itself in bone._

"Take that fucker!"

_Shrieking!_

I grabbed the hairy limb and forced us both into the ground—"Jen, hit it! Now!"—wrestling the short, wiry beast, giving Jen precious seconds to regain her senses, seeing her crazed, wet face: mouth open, teeth bared—"Bite the motherfucker!"—and smelling its blood before smashing its temporarily defenseless body in the face with my fist!

Jen stomped it with her boot.

And again.

My eyes were adjusting to the darkness and I could see blood dripping from her mouth, and ten feet ahead Marcus hacking at one of them with the machete.

"Stay together!" I yelled.

We moved in tandem as the jungle threatened to tear itself apart with shrieks and chanting.

"They're chimpanzees," Jen said.

One leapt at us from above, catching me in the chest, knocking me over—

I couldn't breathe.

Another two emerged from the front. Marcus sliced one open but the other climbed on his back and pinned his arms.

He flailed, unable to shake it off.

The chimp that had knocked me over hit me in the jaw, then brought its terrible face close to mine, shrieked and displayed its repulsive teeth.

Struggling, I tried desperately to find Jen.

The chimp smacked my face again.

The pain lingered.

Marcus was writhing on the ground, machete beyond his reach, and the chimp whose shoulder he'd sliced _was picking it up._

More and more of them materialized out of the darkness.

The chimp gripped the machete by the handle and raised it purposefully above its head.

The one on top of me bit my shoulder until I screamed. It was getting ready to take a bite of my face when—

_A shot rang out._

The chanting and the shrieking ceased.

The chimp still held me down, but it seemed the assault was over. The primate merely looked into my eyes until I defeatedly averted mine.

The other one obediently lowered the machete.

The downpour too had eased.

_Another shot._

"Idi Amin!" the chimps said in deep, horrible unison.

I felt long fingers wrap themselves around my ankles and I began to move—pulled along the wet, rough underbrush...

"Jen!"

I received a sharp smack to the cheek for my disobedience, but there was no response. As far as I knew, Jen had succumbed during the battle. In my head, I heard her voice echo two overlapping sentences: "I love you. We're all going to die. I love you. We're all going to die. I love you…"

I cannot say for how long the chimps pulled us or how far they moved us, but it must have been hours, because when my body finally came to rest, my shirt was stuck painfully to my raw back. I lay there staring at the stars in the sky, thankful I was alive yet hoping I soon could die. The stars twinkled coldly, their light reaching me from an irrevocable and unbelievable past, cosmically devoid of empathy and offering not even a delusion of God or understanding. They didn't even have the decency to mock me.

I was shivering and abandoned.

A light approached.

When it neared it split in two, and soon a trinity of chimpanzees came into view: two had thick dark fur and carried torches, and the third stood between them in the flickering torch light in skin the dark pink of ripe grapefruit barely covered by thin strands of greying—almost snowy white—hair.

The torchbearers eyed me with disdain.

But the gaze of the third chimp, whom I would come to know as Pinkerton, was more complex, with hints of hatred, fascination and devotion.

"Idi Amin?" one of the torchbearers said.

"Idi Amin," said Pinkerton.

Then he motioned for me to rise, and when I had:

"Idi Amin?" he asked.

I stood still and silent for several seconds, perhaps waiting for them to pounce, certainly thinking about my own abysmal situation and the sheer absurdity of it, until I felt a tranquility come over me and I responded with the only words I knew they would understand:

"Idi Amin."

One torchbearer took both torches, and the other stepped toward me.

I made no movements.

Eventually he came within an arm's length, grabbed my wet and bloody shirt with his powerful hands and ripped it from my chest. He then retreated to a safe distance and asked, "Idi Amin?"

"Idi Amin," I responded with perfect understanding, and proceeded to strip out of what remained of my clothes until I was left wearing only my boots.

The final surge of the rain shower cleansed my naked body as Pinkerton and the torchbearers escorted me through the jungle to a cement amphitheatre that I knew immediately was the work of human hands.

Marcus was already there.

One of the torchbearers pushed me inside, and I heard a metal gate swing shut behind me.

"Where _the fuck_ are we?" Marcus asked.

He was as naked as I was. "Have you seen Jen?" I asked back.

"No."

I was aware of increasing numbers of chimpanzees gathering in the seats above and around us.

"This is insane," he yelled. "What do you think they want from us?"

I said I didn't know.

That's when I heard Jen scream my name. _From somewhere_. I spun trying to find her. "Where the hell are you?"

There was rattling of metal against metal and I saw:

Jen looking down at us from a cage.

Her body muddy and bruised.

Her hands grasping furiously at the cage's metal bars as a chimp beat them with a machete.

"We're fucked," Marcus yelled. "Totally fucked. Best case scenario—"

A machete landed audibly in the middle of the amphitheatre.

Marcus rushed toward it.

I stayed where I was. "Maybe we can…"

But my words trailed off as the chimps in the audience began clapping their hands and chanting, birthing a cacophony of violence and chaos. It was almost infectious. Deep within me, I felt an urge to join in, a desire for bloodlust, and when I saw Marcus I knew he felt it too.

He brandished the machete—

At me!

"They want _us_ to fight," he said, moving suddenly to his left.

_Idi Amin… Idi Amin… Idi Amin…_

I moved to my left as well, keeping him directly in front of me, glancing sporadically at Jen's cage, feeling my heart threatening to burst out of my naked chest, trying to retain a semblance of control over the situation.

"Winner survives," Marcus barked.

"You're insane," I yelled at him. "They'll kill us both."

But I didn't believe it. If they'd wanted us dead, we would already be dead.

"Winner gets Jen!" he—

_rushed at me._

Jen's scream pierced the ambient discord like an air raid siren.

I exhaled.

Marcus lunged, slashing at me with the machete.

I evaded once, twice—

Backpedalling—

The third slash caught me on the outside of my left forearm, raised to shield my neck, and in that instant of my sharp pain and his hesitation, I reacted a fraction quicker, and before he could follow through on his advantage, I had angled around him and—still in the act of rotating—caught him behind the knee with sufficient power and momentum to confuse his balance and send him scrambling forward to his knees. He barely managed to crawl forward before I was on him, on his defenseless back, and _without thinking but acting on some primeval instinct_ pummeling his face into the concrete floor as hard as I could, time after sickening time, long after he had lost the grip on the machete, then on his consciousness, finally his life, and I was so exhausted I was barely smearing a sludge of blood and bone on concrete with the remnants of what were once his face.

The bloodlust ebbed.

I stood, slid Marcus' corpse aside with my boot, spread my arms and beat my triumphant chest while basking in the wild reverie of victory.

In her cage, Jen sobbed uncontrollably.

But I didn't care. In that moment, I heard the chimps chanting and I knew they were chanting solely for me. I grabbed the machete from the ground and thrust it into the air, joining in their call: "Idi Amin! Idi Amin! Idi Amin!"

The amphitheatre doors swung open and Pinkerton entered.

He was alone.

He was holding a pistol.

"Idi Amin," he commanded, and Jen's cage opened. She blinked in disbelief, then stumbled out.

I tightened my grip on the machete.

Pinkerton advanced.

Jen picked up speed as she ran along the inner edge of the amphitheatre, before finding her way down to the entrance and joining me on the inside.

We embraced—

Then assumed a back-to-back position. I could feel her heavy breathing. Her heartbeat. Her very lifeforce, with which I longed to live and spend the rest of my life...

A hush fell over the audience.

Pinkerton watched us.

There was an undeniable wisdom in his ancient eyes.

"I love you," Jen breathed.

_Three tender words_. I closed my eyes and remembered her face: how young when we first met, how peaceful while she slept, how vulnerable when overcome with sadness, how understanding when I needed her, and how mine and beautiful in the plain everyday. I imagined our life together: a happy lifetime in the blink of an eye. Wedding, children, a house. How painful it was to consider it never coming true. How painful it was when she stabbed me below the ribs. "I'm sorry," she whispered. And shivved me a second time.

Three tender words—

I put my hand to my wound and felt the warmth of blood.

I remained standing. There was a power to the bloodlust that had been opened in me. A burst dam never to be fixed, through which cascaded an almost supernatural power.

She attacked me with the knife a third time—

I caught her wrist.

_I squeezed._

She hit me with her other hand but the impact was dull and hollow.

I twisted her arm until she dropped the knife.

I kicked her in the side. She fell.

"I love you too," I said.

I removed my hand from my wound, letting the blood erupt above my hip and pour down my leg, gripped the machete firmly with both hands, raised it and—in one perfectly realized arc—decapitated her.

Her head rolled away with mouth grotesquely agape.

The rest of her body crumpled.

I dropped the machete and applied as much pressure to my wound as possible, but I had already lost a lot of blood. I needed a bandage. I needed medical care.

My vision blurred.

Pinkerton stepped toward me, then knelt on creaking bones and bowed.

"Idi Amin," he said.

"Idi Amin!" the audience erupted.

"Idi Amin," Pinkerton said.

"Idi Amin!"

And in those words I heard the promise of my salvation. The job interview had concluded, and I had been chosen. They would not let me know in a few weeks. _They were letting me know now_. The job was being offered.

_Idi Amin! Idi Amin! Idi Amin!_

"Idi Amin!" I roared.


	28. A Short Introduction to Licking

Licking is a lot harder to understand than to explain. What it is is actually pretty simple: **sneaking into a celebrity's house, licking something they own and filming yourself doing it.**

That's it.

Some people say it's not really licking unless you post the video, but I don't agree with that. I've known some amazing lickers who've never put anything online but have personal collections that would blow your mind. They just don't do it for the hits or followers. They do it for the thrill, the challenge and the art of it.

And when we do post online, it's not on Instagram or Reddit or anything, because technically what we're doing is illegal most of the time, so we have our own little corners of the internet. Not the dark web, just not entirely out in the open. Let's just say that if the internet has shadows, that's where we hang out.

You may be wondering what exactly I meant when at the very beginning I said that lickers lick something a celebrity owns. Well, I meant that pretty literally, but as they say _there are levels to this shit_.

At the bottom of the licking pyramid you'll find the chance lickers. These are people who lick when they get the chance but don't really go looking for it. Like if you're at a restaurant and you see someone famous, and then after they leave you go and grab their chopsticks and lick them, you're a chance licker. Chance lickers don't get a lot of respect within the community.

Next up are the gate lickers, so called because they go out of their way to find where celebrities live, but they don't actually get inside. Instead they lick whatever happens to be available. A lot of the time that's the gate, but it could also be a car, a retaining wall, anything. The one special sub-category is garbage licking, but you can guess what that is.

Now let's get to hard mode.

Once you get past the gate and into a celebrity's house, you've arrived as a licker. It doesn't matter if you sneak in, break in or get invited, just as long as you grab something, lick it and film yourself doing it. The only rule is that you can't be friends with the celebrity or it doesn't count. Other than that, the sky's the limit. You can lick phones, fridges, tupperware, toothbrushes, shampoo bottles, anything. In fact the weirder the better. The community only really looks at two things, who the celebrity is and what the object is, and you can get mad props for licking something no one's ever licked even if the celebrity's not super famous.

Finally there are the legends.

These are lickers who've not only gotten into a celebrity's house _but have actually licked the celebrity_. The most common way is to get them when they're sleeping or passed out, but there's no rule, so take it as it comes!

Happy licking!


	29. The Sackheads

I was there when they shut the city gates. We had gathered in the Square, most of us fearful of the sickness spreading in the lands beyond, about which the travellers' tales spared no gruesome detail, but a few—and I remember well their torrid faces bathed in the eerie autumn twilight—frantic to escape, screaming as they clawed at the cold stone walls, the guards, themselves, before being dragged away. How prescient they in hindsight were. Perhaps they truly saw our faceless fate foretold. After all, is a tomb not but a vault expired?

Soldiers manned the gates in dreary half-day shifts, but no patrols went out, and not a soul was let within the walls. We heard sometimes the terrible cries of those turned back, and that awful refrain: "By order of the Council, none shall enter!"

But some did enter, by darkness covered or by tunnel. There were even rumors that some passed by black magic: a sacrifice made; a secret word exchanged. Yet whatever their method of infiltration—or perhaps none, and the sickness had been with us all along—the consequence was the same. The sickness appeared, flared and spread.

The first case identified was in the Money Quarter. The victim, a merchant, was found on blood soaked sheets, facial skin heaped beside him and gold coins pressed into his exposed flesh. He had scratched off his nose and clawed out his eyes, but he was still alive when they took him. The Council studied him for days as he suffered, but we all knew the outcome. The tales had been true.

The gates remained shut.

The sickness triggered an insatiable urge to mutilate and expunge one's own face. The means varied, from bare hands to the most creative use of objects, but the result was the same: facelessness. There was no cure or respite. Every affliction culminated in a bloody act of self-effacement.

Not every afflicted died. Some survived and carried on. We called them the sackheads, after their custom of covering their disfigured heads with burlap sacks on which they had painted the most grotesque and hideous faces. Misshapen eyes, inverted noses and snarling, toothless mouths in angular smiles that mocked the very notion of happiness.

There was also a second group: people like me, whom the sickness spared. We called ourselves the facemores, and against a backdrop of dread we gathered secretly and rejoiced in our health—for a time. For as the sickness advanced, the sackheads began to outnumber us, and with their number grew jealousy.

The sackheads staged their first _smash-and-burn_ on a dreary November night. Door-to-door by torch light they went, searching for facemores, whom they dragged into the streets and theatrically debased, and whose faces they physically destroyed. Then on their heads they placed sacks with sad, inverted smiles, and left them to bleed through and die.

I write this now with a shaking hand, for I see the flickering light.

_A knock._

"By order of the Council—"

They've come!


	30. My husband is nocturnal yet he lacks the common plumage

I can't say he ever stopped loving us.

That would be unfair.

All I can say is that one day he became a little distant, but not in the usual way, not like the way people become distant when they cheat on each other. More like the way a cat is distant from a person or space is distant from the Earth, like it's a question of nature, _a deep question_. Already from the first signs, I had the impression there was a fundamental misalignment of not who but _what_ we were.

It began with a newspaper—his opening and hiding behind it.

Not because he was reading the paper (he never read the paper) but because he was using it to create a barrier, to separate himself from us. In hindsight, there was symbolism or irony in those unfolded pages, so much like wings, but at the time it just struck me as odd. All the same, there they were, in the kitchen, in the living room, in bed.

One day our son hurt himself while playing. He wailed and bled onto the carpet, and my husband just sat unmoved behind his great newspaper as if nothing had happened.

I got bandaids and cleaned the stains.

Only then did my husband react. He folded his newspaper and proceeded up the stairs, from where he watched us for several more minutes before disappearing into the bathroom.

Next came the nudity, the crouching on furniture and the isolation.

By the time I came home from work to find him naked and perched on the armrest of the living room sofa, I knew there was likely a mental problem. There was no talking to him about it, however, because he flat out refused to say anything. I warned him that if his behaviour continued he would have to move out, at least temporarily, because he was freaking out the kids, but there was no response beyond the predatory stare of those big unblinking eyes.

Yet he must have understood, because from that day on he spent most of his time away from us, in the garage, the cellar and the attic.

God only knows what he did in there, but I'll never forget the night sounds, the squeaks and shrieks and the thuds which always preceded a silence that was somehow even more uncomfortable than the noises before it. And it all coincided with the disappearance of the mice that moved into our cellar every summer, so that I understood he must be hunting even before that awful day when he joined us unexpectedly for breakfast (nude, of course, and crouching on his chair) and in full view of me and the kids proceeded to vomit up a half digested rodent that hit the tabletop with the most gruesome plop. Then, after surveying it and us in turn, bowed his head and feasted on the carcass until there was nothing left but a few broken bones.

"What's wrong with daddy?" my daughter would sometimes ask. "He's going through a hard time," I'd answer, reassuring her that we still loved him and he loved us.

I put the kids into therapy, but what they told the therapist or what she believed about us I'll never know. As for myself, I held off, hoping I was strong enough to deal with this _transformation_ on my own, and for a while I was. Late summer turned to early fall, and we developed a working rhythm to our lives. It helped that by now my husband was almost entirely nocturnal, spending our waking hours asleep in some hidden corner of the house, and becoming active while we slept, and increasingly outdoors at that.

For a while I was afraid of what the neighbours might think if they caught him stalking around the subdivision at night, but time helped with that. There were no strange looks, no whispered comments, no heads turned in disgust, and I realized that he was being careful, if that's the right word. I doubted he cared much about their opinions, or how those opinions would reflect on us (I admit I dreaded being known as the wife of _that freak_ ), but he was a predator now, and a good predator had to be invisible—until he swept in for the kill. Mice, rats, rabbits, perhaps other birds...

I followed him once, out into the darkness, down our street and quietly into the forest that grew along the edge of the subdivision. He truly seemed at home there. He moved with a grace I'd never seen before, and climbed trees better than any man I'd known. His body, no doubt starved by the first few weeks when he was still learning to catch his prey, was lean and muscular in the moonlight. He was attractive. If he saw me trailing him, and likely he did, he showed no sign of it, and merely ascended one of the tall oaks and clung there, scanning his wild domain with slow, fluid motions of the neck, and every once in a while letting out a deep and masculine hoot.

That autumn must have been the crowning moment of his existence.

In a way, I was proud of him.

But winter came early that year. The temperatures dropped and the persistent snow drove the little forest creatures into hiding. Yet my husband did not give up his owlness. Bare and featherless, he shivered in the blowing winds, and I imagined the fevered nights he must have spent hugging his favourite oak while the food around him grew scarce.

I saw him infrequently in those days, but when I did I noted how grey and wrinkled he looked, even from the distance he now kept from me. Once, I left scraps of meat for him—the only time I did anything that could be seen as encouraging his behaviour—but he didn't take them, and they must have fed some other animal instead. I noticed too that sometimes he was marked with blood, and it pained me to know how brutal life can be and how he must have fought with other predators for survival.

But I admit I did not suspect him when the first neighbourhood child disappeared. I didn't want to accept that he was capable, let alone culpable. 

Yes, he was a changed _thing_ that had grown accustomed to killing small mammals, but I still saw in him the sweet man I'd married, however distant those times now seemed, and I didn't want to believe that he was capable of murder. Did I love him? Yes, in the way you might love a beautiful landscape, one that fills your soul with awe, but my inaction was motivated more by how I remembered our youthful love: warm, intimate and bursting with potential for a perfect life. It's hard to give that up.

When the second and third child disappeared, I knew it was him, but still I remained silent. When the police interviewed me, I told them my husband had gone away for work, and I instructed the kids to do the same. I stayed up entire nights, sleepless not only with the guilt of knowing what he'd done but that he would surely do it again. But how would I even tell the police? What words and phrases? I tried writing it down, but it sounded absurd.

_My husband is an owl._

I daydreamed about telling the grieving parents about what had happened, hoping to at least give them closure, but my imaginary explanations became apologies, then excuses—nature was cruel, merciless, and every creature had the right to do all within its power to survive—and in my head I concocted elaborate arguments in which I would yell myself back to consciousness with the cold logic of _why should my husband die and your kids live_? If they were weak and he was strong, why didn't he deserve to live at their expense?

Perhaps what happened was justice.

It was three days before Christmas. The decorations were up, our favourite carols were playing softly in the background, and the kids and I had done our best to forget, if only for a few days, the surreality of the past months.

I put them to bed around ten, and turned on _It's a Wonderful Life_ in the living room.

I must have dozed off on the sofa because—

I awoke to _crunching_.

Within seconds I was alert, and heading up the stairs.

My heart raced.

Coldness rushed down the upstairs hallway, and immediately I noticed that my son's bedroom door was open.

I ran to it.

I looked inside.

I saw:

Across a volume of snow-infested air, my husband _and my daughter_ crouching over my son's limp, _opened_ body, followed by that dreadful moment when they both lifted their heads, hot blood dripping down their faces, their big eyes staring absently at me, and intoned those hideous, echoing sounds...

_Hoot… Hoot…_

_Hoot… Hoot…_

Then they dropped their heads in unison and continued _crunching_.

I don't remember what I did next, screamed while beating them away from my son's corpse or checked to see if he was still alive, but what does it matter? He was dead, and the last glimpse I ever had of my husband and daughter was as they flitted, one neatly after another, through the broken bedroom window, onto the tiled roof below and out into the raging blizzard, whose natural whiteness swallowed them whole.


	31. How To Speak To Cultists

Now that you are working from home, you need to be aware of the cultists in the neighbourhood. Given the global situation, **they are aggressively recruiting**. To avoid falling for their underhanded techniques, please follow these simple rules:

  1. Whenever you open the door for someone, ask them, "Excuse me, but are you perchance an unsolicited representative here to inquire whether _I desire to join the Cult of Great Cthulhu_?"

  2. Cthulhu is pronounced Khlûl′-hloo, which is tricky to say, so please practice by speaking the above-mentioned sentence aloud several times. Once you've said it three times without making a mistake, you should be sufficiently prepared.

  3. If the person at the door answers your question in the affirmative, say firmly and immediately, "I have heard about your cult, but I believe solely in science so _I hereby irrevocably renounce all the gods. Except Cthulhu_ isn't even a real god, so get lost!"

  4. Because you want to teach the crazy cultist a lesson and discourage him from continuing his recruitment activities, please also spit in his face. (It is considered obscene for a cultist to have a non-believer's freely given genetic material on his face.)

  5. That should be enough to send the cultist away. However, if you wish to avoid such interactions altogether, we are currently creating a do-not-recruit list so please contact us with your full name and address and we shall make sure to add you to the list.




That is all.

Thank you for your time and patience, and may you and your loved ones remain safe in these troubled times.


	32. I wish to tell you of a street that travelled, and the monsters living there

I grew up on a movable street.

This requires explanation.

In simplest terms it means that from my birth until my eventual escape, although I spent every day of my life on the same street, the street itself travelled.

To where and how often, I cannot say. When I escaped, it was in Pittsburgh.

When I first saw the rolling, it was in Rome.

I imagine the street travelled frequently, secretly and globally, and I know it travelled as a rolled-up Armenian rug in the back of a white, unmarked delivery truck, but much beyond that remains a mystery to me.

Because I am afraid I may have lost you by now, please allow me to explain from the beginning—

Many years earlier.

I want to start with my family.

It was a large family, two parents and five siblings (three sisters and two brothers), of which I was the youngest, and we lived happily together in a large white house somewhere on the street. If I close my eyes, I still remember how the stucco felt against my hands as I ran them across the exterior walls, or on my bare back as I reclined against its textured warmth on a summer day while reading one of my books. I mention these sensations because I want to convince myself—and convince you—that the street, the house, and the people were real, and not just figments of my imagination.

I remember everything about my family.

That’s why it breaks my heart to know I will never see them again.

I am an orphan.

But I am an orphan by choice, and at least I still have my books—those transcendent books…

Both my parents and all my siblings worked in the same employment, a factory a short walk down the street from our home. From the day I turned ten, I also worked there. It was a wonderful place and we had lots of fun. Although we had set working hours, there was no oversight and we did largely as we pleased. Our job was simple: to make toys, of all kinds and colours and shapes and materials. My favourites were musical dolls. You pulled a string and the doll played a beautiful and enchanting melody.

Although it strikes me as strange today, at the time I never gave it a second thought that we were the only workers in the factory. Such a large building, with its high ceilings and resounding volume of emptiness, yet I couldn’t imagine sharing it with anyone, and I believed every family had its own factory which produced its own fine objects. I was certain that was how we obtained our furniture, our food, our dinnerware, our chemicals and every other domestic necessity. Everything was delivered. My father mailed a request and within days there it was, boxed up in the street and ready to be brought inside.

There were other people who appeared on the street (the banker, the bookshop owner, the washers) but we didn’t interact with them often, and my memories of them are hazy. There weren’t any children my age, but my siblings were my friends and I was content in this sparse world of mystery and adults.

Other sensations I remember about the street are its yellow pavement, its majestic street lights, the winds that rushed without warning up and down and across its expanse, and the monster.

The monster was the reason my parents laid down the rules:

  1. Never stay outside past sundown.

  2. Never venture off the street.

  3. Never read any of the unapproved books.




It was ultimately a book, albeit an approved one, that began my process of realization. As far back as I remember, I loved to draw. I was the only one in the family with talent for art, which put my parents in the unusual position of having to provide new supplies for me, for we had no used pastels, paints or art books. 

One day, they called me to the living room and presented me with a gift-wrapped package of art supplies, sketchbooks, and two leather-bound volumes that I would so learn to cherish: **A Brief Illustrated History of Western Art** by R.W. Watson and **Drawing: Materials & Techniques, Second Edition** by Vladimir Kunin. It was from the latter I learned about negative space, lighting and perspective, and it was while sitting with my sketchbook on my knees while reclining against our white stucco walls, drawing what I saw _rather than what I believed to be_ , that I first noticed something off about the street and therefore about the world. Because, try as I might, when I drew the view of the street before me, the perspective lines of the various objects and buildings did not make sense!

At first, I erased my lines and tried again. Over and over until the paper was as thin as skin. I was sure I was the one making the mistake. Each time, however, I achieved the same incorrect result. I drew what was but not what should have been.

Frustrated, I put down the sketchbook and picked up Watson instead, eager to flip its endless pages of artworks and prove to myself that it was in fact Kunin, and his rules about perspective, who was wrong. I am not sure for how long I looked at landscape after landscape after landscape, but it must have been over an hour. When I lifted my head and gazed upon the street once more, it was immediately apparent that it was indeed the street which was distorted. Kunin was right; reality was wrong.

I said nothing to my parents or siblings but continued with my observations, and over the following weeks discovered that not only perspective but also light transgressed the rules. The effect this had on me is difficult to describe, but it was profound. I can only ask that you imagine yourself in a room with two objects, a table and a chair, and one light source, _yet the shadow of the table contradicts the shadow of the chair, and as you cross the room you realize you cast no shadow at all!_

Had I been a few years younger, I would have likely brought my findings to my parents' attention, and they would have soothed my fears with adult words and children’s stories, taken away my art books, and hugged me until the fog of desirable forgetfulness rolled in. Perhaps I even would have done so at the time, if not for another—far more sinister—experience.

For the first time, I transgressed the rules.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and after finishing my workday at the factory I took my usual route home, but instead of going inside to eat dinner and read one of my books by the fireplace, I walked past. Various buildings lined the street, some similar to ours, others resembling the factory, and others wholly different, and one-by-one I knocked on their doors.

No one answered.

When I was beyond sight of our home, the wind picked up. It was a chill and howling wind that seemed to originate in some impossibly distant and unknown place and which penetrated me to the marrow of my bones.

In my old state of mind, I would have turned back.

Now I persisted.

Despite walking for not more than half an hour, the sun began to set, and an unexpected, heavy darkness fell upon the street.

The street lights turned on.

But I saw how their illuminated cones sinned subtly against the natural laws of light.

It was night.

I was more scared than ever I had been on the street, and I knew that I was breaking a rule, but I thought, _If reality itself can break the rules, why not I?_

That's when I saw her:

A little girl strolling ahead, so innocent and tiny in the void between the buildings looming on either side of her. She wore a big backpack but was alone, and for reasons I cannot truthfully explain I knew immediately that she was not _of the street_ but herself a stranger to it.

For a span of time, I walked behind her.

We walked in silence broken only intermittently by the wind.

Then I heard the first notes of a familiar melody, perhaps a passage from Strauss or Dvořák, and the girl heard it too, for she stopped and turned her body, first one way and then the other, to find where the melody was coming from, and it was in the very moment when she finally seemed to locate its source, a narrow alley between two buildings both so much resembling my family home, that I placed my own knowledge of the music: _You pulled a string and the doll played a beautiful and enchanting melody._

The girl stepped toward the alley.

And on a wall opposite—

I saw—

The monster's shadow spill ominously across the darkened rocks and mortar:

a shadow without a light:

night obscured by _something darker than itself_

flowing across the cobblestones, following the girl into the alley.

The wind shrieked and fumed and—

Died.

And in the sudden stillness the street flickered.

_I flickered._

Then a child's solitary scream pierced the stagnant air, echoing ever and ever fainter...

It was only when silence had returned that I found the courage to peer inside the alley. The girl was gone and there were no shadows, but resting peacefully on the ground I saw a backpack and a doll. I entered, knowing now what it was the washers searched for in the street, and sat down reverently beside the backpack as if it were a grave. It was filled with exotic clothing, strange books and many unfamiliar objects. Like the girl, they were not _of the street_. Although each subsequent second spent in the alley filled me with dread, I inspected the objects carefully in turn before returning to the backpack all but one, a book titled **David Copperfield** by Charles Dickens.

When I rejoined the street, evening had replaced the night.

The sun hung sullen above the horizon.

Making my way back home, I thought about what I had seen and felt, and realized for the first time that the street was false and hideous and his. It existed for him; we existed for him, working every day to aid him in his evil. I wanted to believe that my parents and siblings knew nothing of the monster’s crimes, but I could not. At best, I could attribute to them an ignorance stemming from a wilful lack of curiosity, a perpetual turning of the blind eye, but is that truly so different from knowing? At worst, they knew it all, in detail and forever, as in the factory they joyfully churned out lures with which the monster caught his prey as he and we travelled on the street round and round the world.

I had almost made it home when from behind I heard a sudden whining, as of ancient mechanical gears.

I turned in time to see the half-set sun spin.

Then two men spoke, but their voices came from without the heavens above the street, and they spoke a language I did not understand.

What happened next I still shudder to recall yet find myself unable properly to convey in words.

It was this: reality—by which I mean all I saw before me: the street, its buildings, the land and the sky—compressed, losing all depth, and became as if painted upon the face of a great cosmic wave, arising from non- into existence, and I, standing on an impossible shore, saw it curve and roll up reality, growing and roaring and approaching until it was a great tsunami!

Then down it crashing came, and I too was made flat and rolled.

I awoke in my own bed.

It was morning, and as I bounded down the stairs to the living room I noted that nothing was out of place or even slightly changed. I returned upstairs in a cold sweat, and perhaps would have considered it all a nightmare if not for Charles Dickens, whose **David Copperfield** lay closed atop my bed sheets. I slid shivering into bed, opened the covers and read my first unapproved book. I didn’t read it in one sitting, but I devoured it within a week, sometimes going over chapters again and again and imagining the world they described, which was not my world but which I was nevertheless convinced was the truth.

To my family, I was unaltered. But in my heart I knew I must escape the street.

I continued drawing and painting, but I no longer paid attention to the irregularities around me. Instead, I used my art as time alone to think. Indeed, it was while rolling one of my many painted canvases that I hit upon the idea of the street itself as a painted canvas, and that what I had experienced as the rolling of reality was akin to the rolling of a canvas. I thought about _why_ I rolled my canvases (to keep them safe and to transport them) and with every new idea I felt not only the electricity of excitement but the birth of an escape plan. A canvas, I knew, had edges; the street might also have edges. A canvas was often shaped and aligned in a way to complement its content; the street might also be so aligned. Based on what I had experienced, I theorized that the street must have an end (else how could it be rolled?) but that it might be _nearly_ infinitely long, so attempting to escape down its length would be impossible. What, however, of its width? For my entire life, I had lived _on and along_ the street. I decided it was time I tried walking _away_ from it.

I made my attempt three days later.

My mind was an amalgamation of fear and expectation as I cut into an alley much like the one in which the girl had disappeared, then pressed perpendicularly onward. I forbid myself from looking back, yet my imagination fabricated mental images of shadows in pursuit. I trudged past them, and some time later noticed that the details of the world around me were degrading into greyness, haze and an overall lack of sharpness and precision.

I felt like I had entered the background of a giant painting.

And then, over an ashen hill, I saw the dynamic, focussed colours and heard the absolute chaos of a mass of people and the living, breathing world—

Your world!

_The real world!_

I stopped short of crossing over, but I stared, mesmerized by its alienness.

Its brilliance and complexity took my breath away.

Much later, I identified one of the buildings I had seen as the Arch of Constantine, which proved to me that I had been in Rome.

But having seen its edge, I returned to the street. That had always been the plan. I had to know the edge existed before I could escape it, and as I stepped through the doors to my home, my parents and siblings flocking around me (I had been gone almost a week!) I made the decision to leave them behind forever. In those initial moments of love and excitement, as we embraced each other, I even tried to introduce them to a fraction of truth, a mere insinuation of doubt, but they would not have it. They scolded me and warned me and laughed at the suggestion that the street was not the world, and in the morning they went dutifully to work in the factory.

I packed my things and walked the street for the last time, wiping tears and feeling the weight of the task ahead: not only leaving the only home I had ever known, but learning to create a new one in a foreign world. I did experience a few moments of weakness during which I felt compelled to turn back, but I had only to remember the girl’s scream, and its still reverberating echoes. A sound like that never truly dissipates; it haunts the world eternal.

By the time I entered the background, the wind was picking up.

I knew that meant a rolling was imminent.

I sped up and spotted the edge just as the first corner of faux-reality bent upward.

This time there was no drama. I was already standing at the edge, between the blurred greyness of the extreme background and vivid energy of the real world, when the cosmic wave loomed threateningly above me. I closed my eyes and stepped—

onto a concrete sidewalk, like I have done countless times since. I was on a side road in downtown Pittsburgh, which may not sound as exciting as Rome, but you couldn’t have told that to my beating heart. Cars drove past, pedestrians avoided me while giving me the dirtiest looks, and I must have been wide-eyed and dumbstruck, with my hand on my chest, feeling the pounding of an unshackled vitality that you simply call life. Everything was new to me. I was terrified and exhilarated, and when I looked to see where I had come from, there was nothing. Pittsburgh continued in all directions.

I barely noticed, perhaps a hundred feet away, an unmarked, white delivery truck into which two men were shoving a rolled-up Armenian rug. When they spoke, I may not have understood their words _but I recognized their voices._ The only difference was that now the voices originated in the world I was in.

After maneuvering the rug into the truck, they got in and took off.

What a bizarre feeling it is to see your entire world thrown into a truck and driven off, like it actually was a rug to be delivered to someone’s living room. It makes you feel both otherworldly and small. Then you remember the monster, and the monster’s helpers who are your family, and you wish you had done something to stop that truck, because you _feel_ that what to the rolled-up world was not _of the street_ is right in front of you. The monster’s victims are as real as Pittsburgh, and he’s still out there, in a delivery truck somewhere, waiting for his street to be unrolled.


	33. When I see myself reflected in your blood, you are no more

When I look in a mirror, I see through myself.

I have no reflection.

I can see and touch my own body, and other people see me without any problems, but for years I was unable to see my own face.

I don’t show up in photos or on video.

Until I was eleven years old, I knew what my face looked like only from how it felt under my fingertips, how other people described it to me, and from the portraits my parents paid people to draw.

But even the portraits were temporary. They faded within minutes. And if you write a sentence about how I look, the nouns and adjectives evaporate.

_I have a r and ye ._

It’s strange knowing such a unique part of your body—of yourself and your identity—solely through words and pictures, as if you were a character in a story or comic book. 

As if you weren’t real.

And most people aren’t even very good at describing things beyond the most basic and obvious.

The video my parents took of my birth is actually pretty bizarre, because it looks like someone filmed the whole thing, then digitally erased the baby. _Something_ is born. _Something_ is held in its mother’s arms.

_Something_ is loved.

_Something_ goes to school.

_Something_ likes to play with his dog.

It was bad enough everyone knew what I looked like, but worse I could see what they looked like.

I get that if I was born blind, I wouldn’t know what I looked like either, so I should be thankful for being able to see, but there’s something especially cruel about the _seeing everything but yourself_ aspect. It’s like in the Bible, when Adam and Eve could eat everything except the fruit of one fucking tree. I am my own forbidden knowledge. How fucked is that!

Or rather I _was_ my own forbidden knowledge.

Because when _something_ was eleven, _something_ and his friends ignored their parents’ rules and went to play in the abandoned gas station outside of town, where the junkies shoot up, truckers get laid, and God knows what else goes on.

That day there was dying going on.

Some emaciated wreck of a human was babbling his last nonsense words as a stream of bloody fluids that escaped him through where his teeth should have been, ran down his neck and over his sunken, scabby chest before gathering in a pool on the cement beside him.

_Something_ ’s friends were all gone by then, rightly freaked the fuck out.

But _something_ was staring—

_Spellbound._

Not by the dying but by the blood itself, so deeply, darkly red _and so perfectly reflective_.

It was in that mirror-blood I first saw myself.

In the filth of that derelict gas station, in the company of that drooling corpse, I realized that I _could_ see myself— **in blood!**

And what stared back at me was nothing like the portraits.

Or words.

I remember sirens and flashing lights and realizing my friends must have called the police. I don’t know how long I spent crouched there, staring at the blood, but when the cops arrived I knew immediately they couldn’t see the body.

_It was right there_ yet they walked past it.

“Is this some kind of fucking joke?” one of them said to me. But before I could answer, his tone softened and he asked, “Are you OK, son?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

The cops and my friends loitered like drunks around the gas station for at least a quarter of an hour, acting as if they didn’t know why they were there but didn’t want to admit it, then in a mutual but silent embarrassment started leaving.

“It’s boring here. Let’s go to my place,” said one of my friends.

Still the body was right there.

The gaping, toothless mouth, the greenish-yellow stains.

I went with them.

On the way back, I asked my friends whether they had called the police after seeing the dying man.

“Police?”

“Saw somebody dying?”

They had no idea what I was talking about.

A few days later, I got up at night, took a knife from the kitchen and cut myself on purpose, squeezing out enough blood so that it formed a crimson globule on the countertop, then put my face against it so that my eyeball was almost touching the blood. Slowly, I pulled my face away—a slow zooming out—struggling to focus, but I did not see myself. The globule merely reflected in red a distended, empty kitchen.

Animal blood also didn’t work.

Neither did my friend’s blood after I punched him in the nose.

By then it became apparent to me that somehow death must be involved.

I yearned to see myself once more but took solace in the fact that no one else could see the _real_ me. They could not see what I saw, what I knew I was. They saw merely a false projection of their own humanity.

My chance finally came several years later, after my mom had dragged me to her brother’s cottage. My uncle was using a chainsaw to cut firewood, when the chainsaw slipped and he carved a nasty wound into his leg. He screamed and all of us came running. Despite the pressure he kept applying to the wound, his blood poured out of him, through his fingers and down onto the grass and dirt. Under the pretext of trying to help him slow the bleeding, I pressed my hand against his leg, gathering the hot blood in my palm. When I had enough, I stepped suddenly away—They all stared at me.—and, trembling, held out my hand beneath the dirty evening sunlight and gazed upon my own reflection for the second time.

Time again seemed to flow past me, but I recall vaguely, as through a wall of styrofoam, their screams and panic fading fluently away.

Like a forest stream whose source has been shut off.

Until it was quiet, and although I could see my uncle’s body lying on the ground, they one-by-one seemed to lose all interest in it. Eventually they all went back to whatever trivial thing they’d been doing before, and when I asked my mom what happened to my uncle, she said, “Who?” and laughed and said, “But I’ve never had a brother,” and when I later checked her phone and photo albums, sure enough he was not there, and I realized the power of my gaze.

_I am the antonym of being._

More than non-being: dread-form of never-was.

To see myself, I must stare into the blood of the dying or the dead. In doing so, I disengender them.

To catch a glimpse of my own visage I must erase them from time itself.

I am not a human.

_I am negation._

Since that evening at the cottage, I have haunted the places all normal people fear. I track death’s cold footsteps to where the threads of life are finest, and wait for them to fray—to snap. Sometimes I aid in their undoing. Because as long as I draw blood, I can kill without earthly consequence. My reflection is the erasure of crime, for how can one kill what has never existed? 

Every time I see myself reflected, my desire grows.

I am beginning to love myself.

Perhaps I have become enamoured of my own image, but even so my narcissism is of the most unique kind.

For now, I prey only on the weakest among you, those who would not survive long anyway, and in my actions I become their angel: of death / of mercy / of forgetful self-reflection.


	34. Two days ago there was an oil spill you probably didn't hear about

OK, I've finally gotten an internet connection, so I'm going to keep this short and to the point.

Please forgive any mistakes. I’m running on caffeine and nightmares, and the drops of rain hitting the tin roof above me are making me jumpy—

Ready to bite my fingernails off.

I work on an oil tanker. Or maybe I did and don't anymore, I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. What matters is that two days ago, the oil tanker I was working on hit something and started losing cargo into the ocean off the Peruvian coast.

I say cargo because although we were supposed to be carrying heavy crude, what we spilled was not crude. Yes, it was black and viscous, and if you saw footage of it you'd believe it was oil, but believe me when I swear it was something else entirely.

Something _unnatural_.

I have no idea if the spill made the news or not (probably not) but even if it did—or will—ignore what they say about it. It's a cover-up. It has to be, because there's no way in hell they'll tell you the truth about _what we all saw_.

I don't even know how to describe it.

Think of a spill you're familiar with, one you've seen in pictures: Deepwater Horizon, Amoco Cadiz, Exxon Valdez.

Now imagine that black stain on the surface of the water not just floating there but bubbling, frothing and reaching out with inky tentacle arms, attaching themselves to the side of the ship, rocking it, as they climb snail-like toward the deck, and all of us sweating as we stand in stunned silence watching.

I don't know what my thoughts even were.

At first I didn't believe my eyes. Then I thought, _Fuck me! It's alive_.

I didn't hear anyone say a word until one of those arms shot out, grabbed one of the crewmen, squeezed him so hard his innards started oozing out of him, then tossed him into itself, where he sank into blackness.

I want to throw up just remembering.

That's when someone screamed, and we all started screaming. Some of us ran dumbly towards it and others away, trying to find some place to hide. I saw friends of mine beat those arms with wrenches, before the liquid got into an orifice, distending them like balloon-men until they fucking popped into human rain.

It was bedlam.

Then I ran too—and that hideous thing followed me!

I saw a guy lop off three metres of one of its filthy arms with an axe, and the lopped-off bit just continued along, inching forward like a death worm, taking its hideous revenge on him before merging back into the original limb.

One of them slithered after me down a corridor, and when I thought I was just far enough ahead to duck into one of two passageways, the thing split in two, stalking both possibilities. Imagine the whole ship like that, pregnant with those oily tendrils leaving their mucous all over the floors, hunting us down.

Then the sirens came on.

A message blasted across the intercom telling us to get to the upper deck.

Even that was cut short, punctuated by the gargle of death.

I was lucky enough to to make it, but I don't know how many of us died before they got the escape choppers in. Maybe half. Last time I looked back, there wasn't even a ship anymore, just a dark mound drifting on the ocean.

When they got us back on land, they herded us into a room to give us a debrief. But I saw the mix of lawyers and machine guns, and I wasn't having any of that, so the moment I could, I ran.

Into the jungles.

Into night.

Now here I am, typing this fucking madness into the internet on a dial-up modem somewhere.

I'm sure they'll come for me too.

But I got the truth online, and there's no one they can kill to erase that.

As for **it** , _God help us all._


	35. Iris

##  **Iris**

The first person to ever tell me the theory was Iris. It was nighttime in 2015, and we were lying on an old mattress on the roof of a four-storey apartment building in a university town in southern Ontario. A party was going on downstairs to which we’d both been invited and from whose monotony we’d helped each other escape through an ordinary white door that said “No entrance”. It was summer. I remember the heat waves and the radiating warmth of the asphalt. Our semester was over and we had started existing until the next one started in the way all students exist when they don’t spend their months off at home or touring Europe. I could feel the bass thumping from below. I could see the infinite stars in the cloudless sky. The sound seemed so disconnected from the image. Iris and I weren’t dating, we were just friends, but she leaned toward me on the mattress that night until I could feel her breathing on my neck, and, with my eyes pointed spaceward, she began: “What if…”

Back then it was pure speculation, a wild fantasy inspired by the THC from the joint we were passing back and forth and uninhibited by the beer we’d already drunk. There was nothing scientific or even philosophical about Iris’ telling of it. The theory was a flight of imagination influenced by her name and personalized by the genetic defect of her eyes, which her doctors had said would render her blind by fifty. Even thirty-five seemed far away. It’s heartbreaking now to know that Iris never did live to experience her blindness—her own genetic fate interrupted by the genetic fate of the world—but that night, imagination, the quality Einstein called more important than knowledge, lit up both our brains in synapses of neon as we shared our joint, sucking it into glowing nothingness, Iris paranoid that she’d wake up one morning in eternal darkness despite the doctors’ assurances that her blindness would occur gradually, and me fearing that I would never find love, never share my life with anyone, but soothed at least by Iris’ words and her impossible ideas because Einstein was right, and imagination is magical enough to cure anything.

##  **2025, Pre-**

I graduated with a degree in one field, found a low paying job in another, got married, worked my way to slightly better pay, wanted to have a child, bought a Beagle named Pillow as a temporary substitute, lived in an apartment overlooking a green garbage bin that was always full of beer cans and pizza boxes, and held my wife, crying, when we found out that we couldn’t have children. Somewhere along the way my parents died and Kurt Schwaller, a physicist from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, proved a grand theory of everything that rather than being based on the vibrations of strings, was based on a property of particles called viscous time force. I never understood the details. To me they lacked imagination. The overriding point, the experts on television told us, was that given enough data and computing power we could now predict the outcome of anything. The effect was that no one wanted to study theoretical physics and everyone wanted to make breakthroughs in data collection systems and biological hardware. Hackers created a version of Linux that ran from DNA. Western Digital released the first working holographic storage drive. The NSA, FSB, BND and other agencies rushed to put their suddenly valuable mass of unprocessed raw spy data to prognostic use. A Chinese bookmaker known only by the nick ##!! wrote a piece of Python code that could predict the outcomes of hockey games. Within a month, the NHL and KHL were scrambling to come up with ways of saving their leagues by making them more unpredictable. They introduced elements of chance: power plays without penalties, a tilting ice surface, fluctuating rules that sometimes allowed for icings and offsides and sometimes not, and, finally, a pre-game lottery by which the names of the players on both teams were put into a pot and randomly drawn into two squads. Given enough variables, the strategy did thwart the code, but the inherent unfairness of the innovations alienated the players, the draft made owners question why they were paying the salaries of superstars who played against them half of the time, and the fans simply stopped paying attention to a league full of teams for which their already dwindling loyalty had bottomed out. Besides, the code was basic. ##!! had room to expand. The KHL folded first, followed by the NHL, and then the other sports leagues, preemptively. They didn’t bother to wait until their own codes were broken. I remember seeing an interview with ##!! while this was still front page news. The reporter, a perpetually smiling big-breasted blonde with blindingly white teeth, asked him if he thought that hockey could be rescued by the creation of roving blue lines that would continually alter the relative sizes of both offensive zones and the neutral zone. ##!! answered that he didn’t know what a blue line was because he’d never watched a hockey game in his life. His voice was cold, objective, and there was something terrifyingly inhuman about the idea that a person with no knowledge of a subject could nevertheless understand it so completely. Content had become a mere input of form.

By 2025, mainstream interest in the theory of everything faded, not because the theory was wrong but because it was too right and too abstract and now there weren’t any young theoretical physicists to help explain it using cute graphics on YouTube. We consumed what we understood and passively accepted the fallout while going on with our daily lives. The people who did understand made money, but for the rest of us the consequences were less than their potential, because even with enough time, memory and microprocessors the most we could know was the what and the when, not the why. For the governments and corporations pouring taxes and tax-free earnings into complex models of world domination, that didn’t matter. They weren’t interested in cause. They were in the business of exploiting certainty to gain power. As long as they could predict lightning, they were satisfied. If they could make it, all the better. Away from the cutting edge, however, like ants or ancients, what we craved to know was where the lightning came from, what it meant, and on that issue the theory was silent. As Kurt Schwaller put it in a speech to the United Nations, “All I’ve given you is a tool—a microscope to magnify the minutes, so to speak—with which to investigate in perfect detail the entirety of our interrelations. But the investigations still have to made, ladies and gentlemen. Have a hay stack, look for the needle. Know there might not be one.”

In January, my wife and I began a fertility treatment for which we’d been saving for years. It was undoubtedly the reason we became so emotionally involved in the media attention around Aiko, the lovely, black-haired and fashionable Crown Princess of Japan, who along with her husband was going through the same ordeal that we were. For a few months, it seemed as if the whole world sat on the edges of its seat, wishing for this beautiful royal couple to conceive. And we sat on two, our own and one somewhere in an exotic Japan updated by the royal Twitter feed. It strikes me now that royalty has always fascinated the proles, a feeling that historically went in tandem with hatred, respect or awe, but it was the Japanese who held our attentions the longest and the most genuinely in the twenty-first century, when equality had more or less rendered a hereditary ruling class obsolete. The British declared themselves post-Christian in 2014 and post-Royal in 2021, the European Court of Justice ruled all other European royals invalid in 2022, and the Muslim monarchs pompously degraded themselves one-by-one into their own exiles and executions. Only the Japanese line survived, adapting to the times by refusing to take itself seriously on anything but the most superficial level. They dressed nicely, acted politely and observed a social protocol that we admired without wanting to follow it ourselves. Before he died, my father had often marvelled that the Second World War began with Japan being led by an emperor god, and ended with the American occupation forcing him to renounce his divinity. The Japanese god had died because MacArthur willed it and Hirohito spoke it. Godhood was like plaque. If your mother told you to brush your teeth, off it went, provided you used the right flavour of Colgate. Kings had once ruled by divine right. By 2025, the Crown Princess of Japan ruled our hearts merely by popular approval. She was our special friend, with whom we were all on intimate and imaginary terms. Indeed, on the day she died—on the day they all died—Princess Aiko’s was the most friended account on Facebook.

That’s why March 27, 2025, was such a joyous occasion for us. In hindsight, it’s utterly sick to associate the date with happiness of any kind, but history must always be understood in context, and the context of the announcement was a wirelessly connected world whose collective hopes came suddenly true to the jingle of a breaking news story on the BBC. I was in the kitchen sauteing onions when I heard it. Cutting them had made me cry and my eyes were still red. Then the announcer’s voice broke as he was setting up his intro, and in a video clip that was subsequently rebroadcast, downloaded and parodied close to a billion times in the one hundred thirty-two days that followed, he said: “The Crown Princess of Japan is pregnant!”

I ran to the living room and hugged my wife, who’d fallen to her knees in front of the wall-mounted monitor. Pillow was doing laps on and off the sofa. The BBC cut away from the announcer’s joyful face to a live feed from Japan. As I held my wife, her body felt warm and full of life. The top of her jeans cut into her waist. Her tears wetted the top of my shirt sleeve. Both of our phones started to buzz—emails and Twitter notifications streaming in. On the monitor, Aiko and her husband, both of their angular faces larger than life in 110” 1080p, waved to the crowd in Tokyo and the billions watching around the world. They spoke in Japanese and a woman on the BBC translated, but we hardly needed to know her exact words to understand the emotions. If them, why not also us? I knew my wife was having the same thought. We, too, could have a family. Then I smelled burning oil and the pungency of onions and I remembered my sauteing. I gently removed my arms from around my wife’s shoulders and ran back to the kitchen, still listening to Aiko’s voice and its polite English echo, and my hands must have been shaking, or else my whole body was shaking, because after I had turned down the heat I reached for the handle of the frying pan, knocked the pan off the stove top instead, and burned myself while stupidly trying to catch it before it fell, clattering, to the floor. The burned onions splattered. I’d cracked one of the kitchen tiles. My hand turned pale and I felt a numbness before my skin started to overflow with the warmth of pain. Without turning off the broadcast, my wife shooed me downstairs to the garage where we kept our car and drove me to the hospital.

The Toronto streets were raucous. Horns honked. J-pop blared. In the commotion we nearly hit a pedestrian, a middle-aged white woman pushing a baby carriage, who’d cut across Lake Shore without looking both ways. She had appeared suddenly from behind a parked transport—and my wife instinctively jerked the car from the left lane to the right, scraping our side mirror against the truck but saving two lives. The woman barely noticed. She disappeared into a crowd of Asian kids on the other side of street who were dancing to electronica and waving half a dozen Japanese flags, one of which was the Rising Sun Flag, the military flag of Imperial Japan. Clutching my wrist in the hope it would dull the pain in my hand, I wondered how many of them knew about the suffering Japanese soldiers had inflicted on countless Chinese in the name of that flag. To the right, Lake Ontario shone and sparkled in the late afternoon light. A passenger jet took off from Toronto Island Airport and climbed into the sky.

In the hospital waiting room, I sat next to a woman who was reading a movie magazine with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s face on the cover. The Cannes film festival was coming up. My wife checked me in at the reception desk. The woman beside me put down her magazine and told me that she was there with her son, as if needing to justify her presence. I affirmed by nodding. He’d hurt his leg playing soccer for a local Armenian junior boys team, she went on. I said I’d hurt myself frying onions and that I was here with my wife. She said my wife was pretty and asked if I liked movies. Without meaning to do it, I tried to guess her age—unsuccessfully—and proceeded to imagine having doggy style sex with her. She had dark eyes that barely blinked and plump thighs. When I started to feel guilty, I answered her question: sometimes I watched movies at home, but I hadn’t been to a theatre in a decade. When my wife sat down, I let the two of them talk about the woman’s son. I was having trouble concentrating. I took my phone out of my pocket and read all the new emails about the royal conception, then stared at the seconds hand going slowly around its digital clock face on my home screen, wondering why we so often emulated the limitations of analogue machines on devices that were no longer bound by them. I switched my clock type to a digital readout. Now the seconds no longer rotated but flickered away. They called my name over the crackling intercom and a nurse led me to one of the empty rooms. “How about that baby,” he said while we walked. I didn’t see his face, only the shaved back of his head. “The things they can do these days, even for infertile couples.”

I waited for over thirty minutes for a doctor. When one came in, she inspected my hand for less than ten seconds before telling me that I was fine and hinting that I shouldn’t have wasted her time by coming to the emergency room. She had high cheek bones, thin lips and bony wrists. Her tablet had a faux clipboard wallpaper. Maybe I had only misinterpreted her tone. “How about that baby,” I said.

“It’s not a baby yet,” she answered.

This time her tone was impossible to misinterpret. I was only repeating what the nurse had said, I told myself. But I didn’t say that to her. Instead, I imagined her coming home at night to an empty apartment, furnished possibly in a minimalistic Japanese or Swedish style, brewing a cup of black coffee and settling into an armchair to re-read a Simone de Beauvoir novel. I was about to imagine having sex with her when I caught hold of myself and wondered what was up with me today.

When I got back to the waiting room, my wife was no longer there—but the Armenian woman was. She pointed down the hall and told me a room number. She said that sometime after I left, my wife had gotten a cramp and started to vomit all over the floor. Someone was still mopping up. The other people in the waiting room, which was filling up, gave me tactfully dirty looks, either because I was with the vomiter or because I’d shirked my responsible by being away during the vomiting. Irrationally, I wiped my own mouth and fled down the hall.

Inside the numbered room, my wife was sitting hunched over on an observation bed, slowly kicking her feet back and forth. “Are you OK?” I asked.

“Come here,” she said.

I did, and sat beside her on the bed. I repeated my question. She still smelled a little of vomit, but she looked up at me like the world’s luckiest puppy, her eyes big and glassy, and said, “Norman, I’m pregnant.”

That’s all she could say—

That’s all either of us could say for a while.

We just sat there on the examination bed like a pair of best friends on a swing set after dark, dangling our feet and taking turns pulling each other closer. “Are you sure?” I finally asked. My voice was hoarse. I sounded like a frog.

“Yes.” She kicked the heel of my shoe with the rubber toe of hers. “We’re going to have a baby.”

It was beautiful. The most wonderful moment of my life. I remembered the day we met and our little marriage ceremony. I thought about being a father, and felt positively terrified, and about being a better husband, and felt absolutely determined, and as I kissed my wife there in the little hospital room with its sterile green walls, I imagined making love to her. I kept imagining it as we drove back to the apartment through partying Toronto streets. “Not since the Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup!” the radio announcer proclaimed—before I turned him off. I also turned off my phone and my wife’s phone. No more buzzing. In the underground parking lot, I leaned over and licked her soft neck. I pushed her through the open apartment door and straight into the living room, onto the sofa, and wished I could be the cushions beneath her thighs and the air invading her lungs. Pillow barked a greeting and wagged her tail. The monitor on the wall showed talking heads and fertility experts. I unbuttoned my wife’s blouse. She unbuckled my belt. The picture on the monitor dissolved to a close-up of Aiko’s smiling face. My wife and I took turns sliding off each other’s jeans. I kissed her bare stomach. She ran her hands through my hair. I dimmed the lights. We made love.

When we were done it was starry nighttime. My wife bandaged my hand. We turned off the television. The silence was refreshing because people on television too often talk like they’re trying to push you off a ledge. My wife excused me from the duty of making supper because of my ineptness with the frying pan, and handed me a leash instead. I hooked it up to Pillow’s collar and took her outside. While she peed, I gazed up at the sky and identified the Big Dipper. It and the Little Dipper were the only constellations I could identify without using a smartphone app. After Pillow finished, we ducked into a nook and I peed, too. The March sky was amazingly clear of smog. My urine splashed on the concrete and I felt embarrassingly primal. I breathed in, shook out the last drops and zipped up.

In the apartment, we ate grilled portabella mushrooms topped with parmesan and parsley and drank brown rice tea. My wife had changed into fresh clothes. I had changed into fresh skin. Every time she said “mom” and “dad”, the words discharged trickles of electricity up and down my peripheral nervous system. We were happy; we were going to have a baby. The whole world was happy; the Crown Princess of Japan of was going to have a baby. The sounds of drunken urban celebrations drifted in through our bedroom window all night like fog, and we barely slept.

##  **2025, Post-**

Gold is precious because it’s rare. Now close your eyes and imagine that the next time you open them, everything in your world will be golden: your kitchen table, the bananas you bought on the way home from work yesterday, your bottle of shampoo, even your teeth. Now blink. You’re not alone. The market’s flooded. Gold isn’t rare anymore. It’s everywhere. Which means that it’s worth about as much as its weight in mud, because there’s nothing intrinsically good about gold. Can you write on your gold table? It scratches. Surely you can’t eat your golden fruit. Your shampoo’s not a liquid anymore, so your hair’s already starting to get greasy. And if you do find something to eat that’s not made of metal, how long will those gold teeth last before you grind them into finely polished nubs?

For two days the Earth glittered.

For two days we lived in a daze of perfection.

And then, on March 29, a researcher working with lab mice at Stanford University noticed something odd. All of his female mice were pregnant. He contacted several of his colleagues who were also working with mice, rats, and monkeys. All their female animals were pregnant, too. Some of the colleagues had wives and girlfriends. They took innocent-seeming trips to their local pharmacies and bought up all the available pregnancy tests. At home, women took test after test and all of them showed positive. By midnight, the researchers had drafted a joint letter and sent copies of it to the major newspapers in their countries. On the morning of March 30, the news hit.

When I checked my Twitter feed after breakfast, #impregtoo was already trending. Throughout the day, Reddit lit up with increasingly bizarre accounts of pregnancies that physically couldn’t be but, apparently, were. Post-menopausal women, celibate women, prepubescent girls, women who’d had their uteruses removed only to discover that their reproductive systems had spontaneously regenerated like the severed tales of lizards. Existing early stage pregnancies aborted themselves and re-fertilized, like a system rebooting. Later term pregnancies developed Matryoshka-like pregnancies nested within pregnancies. After a while, I stopped reading, choosing to spend time with my wife instead. As night fell, we reclined on the sofa, her head on my chest, Pillow curled up in our tangle of feet, the television off, and the streets of Toronto eerily quiet save for the intermittent blaring of far off sirens, as any lingering doubts about the reality of the situation melted away like the brief, late season snow that floated gently down from the sky, blackening the streets.

On March 30, the World Health Organization issued a communique confirming that based on the available data it was reasonable to assume that all female mammals were pregnant. No cause was identified. It urged any woman who was not pregnant to step forward immediately. Otherwise, the communique offered no guidance. It indicated merely that the organization was already working with governments around the world to prepare for a massive influx of human population in approximately nine months’ time. Most places, including Toronto, reacted with stunned panic. Non-essential workplaces and schools were decried closed. People were urged to stay indoors. Hospitals prepared for possible complications. A few supermarkets ran out of canned food and there were several bank runs, but nothing happened that the existing systems couldn’t handle. Populations kept their nerve. Highway and air traffic increased slightly as people rushed to be with their friends, families and gynaecologists. We spent the entire day in our apartment and let Pillow pee in the tub. Except for the conspiracy theorists, who believed that the Earth was being cosmically pollinated by aliens, most of us weren’t scared to go outside, but we were scared of the unknown, and we preferred to process that fear in the comfort of our own dens.

The New York Times ran a front page editorial arguing for an evaluation of the situation using Kurt Schwaller’s theory of everything. In conjunction with The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Wikipedia Foundation, a website was set up asking users for technical help, monetary donations and the sharing of any surplus computing power.

The project quickly ran into problems. To accurately predict anything, the theory of everything needed sufficient data, and, on April 2, cryptome.org published a series of leaked emails between the French Minister of Health and a high-ranking member of World Health Organization that proved the latter’s communique had been disingenuous at best. Externally, the World Health Organization had concluded that all female mammals were pregnant. That remained true. However, it had failed to admit an even more baffling development: the wombs of all female mammals had inexplicably become impenetrable to all rays and materials that had so far been tried against them. For all intents and purposes, there was no way to see inside the womb, or to destroy it. The only way to revert the body to its natural form, to terminate the pregnancy, was to kill the woman—an experiment that, according to the high-ranking member of the World Health Organization, the French government had helped conduct on unwilling women in Mali. Both parties issued repeated denials until a video surfaced showing the murders. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. They spun their denials into arguments about the necessity of sacrificing lives for the greater good.

Reminded once again of the deception inherent in politics, many turned to religion, but the mainstream religions were hesitant to react. They offered few opinions and no answers. The fringe religions split into two camps. Some leaders welcomed this development, the greatest of all known miracles, while others denounced the same as a universal and unnatural punishment for our collective sins of hedonism, egoism and pride. The most successful of all was the Tribe of Akna, a vaguely mystical Maya revival cult that sprang up seemingly overnight and was led by a Guatemalan freelance programmer named Salvador Abaroa. Although it originated in Mexico City, the Tribe spread as quickly across the world as the computer viruses that Abaroa was notorious for creating. On the Tribe’s homepage, Abaroa could be seen striking an antique brass gong and saying in Spanish-tinged English, “Like energy, life is never destroyed. Every one of us plays an integral part of the cosmic ecosystem. Every man, woman and virus.” Elsewhere on the website, you could buy self-published theological textbooks, listen to scratchy recordings of speeches by Alan Watts and read about the hypothesis that Maya thought was deeply connected to Buddhism because the Mayans had crossed the Pacific Ocean and colonized Asia.

But despite the apparent international cooperation happening at the highest levels, the first week of April was an atomizing period for the so-called people on the ground. We hunkered down. Most personal communication was digital. My wife and I exchanged emails with her parents and sister, but we met no one face-to-face, not even on Skype. We neither invited our neighbours to dinner nor were invited by them, despite how easy it was to walk down the hall and knock. I read far more than I wrote, and even when I did write, responding to a blog post or news story, I found it easier to relate to strangers than to the people I knew. My wife said I had a high tolerance for solitude. “Who do you know in the city?” she asked. Although we’d been living here together for three years, she still considered Toronto mine. She was the stranger, I was the native. I said that I knew a few people from work. She told me to call one of them I’d never called before. I did, and the next day’s sky was cloudless and sunny and there were five of us in the apartment: my wife and I, my friend Bakshi and his wife Jacinda, and their daughter, Greta. Greta drank apple juice while the rest of us drank wine, and all five of us gorged ourselves on freshly baked peach cobbler, laughing at silly faces and cracking immature jokes. It hardly registered for me that the majority of the room was unstoppably pregnant, but wasn’t that the point: to forget—if only for a few hours? Instead of watching the BBC, we streamed BDRips of Hayao Miyazaki movies from The Pirate Bay. Porco Rosso ruled the skies, castles flew, a Catbus arrived at its magical stop. Then Bakshi’s phone rang, and he excused himself from the table to take the call. When he returned, his face was grey. “What’s the matter?” Jacinda asked him. He was still holding the phone to his ear. “It’s Kurt Schwaller,” he said. “They just found his body. They think he killed himself.”

Kurt Schwaller, the foremost theoretical physicist of his time and renowned discoverer of the theory of everything, committed suicide at the age forty-two in the humble bedroom of his Swiss home by swallowing sleeping pills. As far as suicides go, it was graceful and considerate. His husband found him peacefully at rest. He left behind no research, no reports and no working hard drives. He was not terminally ill. He died with his boots off but his computer on, and exactly six hours after his death the computer executed its final chronjob, posting a suicide note to his Facebook page. The note was short and cryptic, and the way in which it spoke so purposefully from beyond the grave unnerved me. It ended: “Like Edith Piaf, I regret nothing. This was not inevitable.” Whether he meant his suicide or something more remained unclear.

“Who’s Kurt Schwaller?” Greta asked.

“He was a very smart scientist,” Jacinda said.

The monitor on the wall was playing Spirited Away. Nobody in the room asked the question that was on everybody’s mind. The internet condensed into a cluster of theories, before exploding as a hysterics of trolling and contradictory evidence. Depending on who was speaking, Kurt Schwaller had either been depressed for years or was the most cheerful person in the world. He simultaneously regretted discovering the theory and considered it the best means of keeping human life sustainable. His death was suspicious, tragic, commendable, prophetic. Some said good riddance. Others said their goodbyes. Yet, as a species, we never quite shook the gnawing belief that he indeed knew something that we didn’t, and that that knowledge was what killed him. His mind may have been as hermetically sealed as the wombs of the women around us, but in his death we sensed our own foretold. I was relieved I didn’t have a daughter to explain that to.

By April 15, no opossums had given birth. By itself that’s not a troubling fact. However, the average gestation period of an opossum is 12 to 13 days. Hamsters, mice and wombats follow with gestation periods of around 20 days, then chipmunks and squirrels. No recorded births of any of these species occurred in April. Physically, their females looked pregnant but that was as detailed as it got: “The specimens display the ordinary symptoms of pregnancy, but they are displaying them in excess of their expected due dates, although they do remain healthy and function comparatively well to their male counterparts.” My wife and I developed a fascination with a particular family of opossums in Ohio that we watched daily via webcam. We gave them names, we pretended to be their voices. Our opossums had adventures, family squabbles and bouts of stress at work. The daughter, Irene, was rebellious. The son, Ziggy, was a nerd. The dad, whom we dubbed Monsieur Charles, sold insurance and the mom, Yvette, worked as stay-at-home technical support for Amazon. We realized right away that we were already preparing for the storytelling phase of parenthood, but we didn’t stop. As uncertain as the future was, the preparation for it was ours and we enjoyed doing it together. Nothing would take that away from us. When I touched my wife’s body in the shower and pressed the palm of my hand against her tummy, it felt no different than it had felt a month before. There was no hardness, no lumps. It seemed unreal that somewhere beneath her skin, for reasons unknown, her body had produced a substance that was impervious to diamond saw blades and precision lasers—a substance that, at least if you believed the rumours, the Russians were already trying to synthesize to use as tank plating.

For the rest of April it rained. Streaks of water ran crookedly down windowpanes, following the laws of physics but just barely. If you stared long enough at the wet glass you forgot there was anything behind it. Eventually, all you saw was your own distorted reflection. I liked when my wife put her arms around me from behind and pressed her chest against my back. I didn’t feel alone.

Pillow started to show her pregnancy in May. The World Health Organization also amended its initial communique, stating that based on the evidence regarding the prolonged gestations of other mammals, it was no longer able to predict an influx of human births in late December. If mice and gerbils weren’t birthing as predicted, humans might not either. However, the amendment stated, preparations were still proceeding along a nine month timeline, and they were ahead of schedule. When the BBC showed field hospitals in South Sudan, I wondered what the schedule entailed because the images were of skeletal tent-like buildings that despite their newness already had the aura of contamination. My wife said it was naive to expect the same medical standards in developing countries as in developed ones. Perhaps she was right. The BBC repeated the platitude that there wasn’t enough money for everyone, listed the foreign aid and private funds that had come in, and interviewed a tired young doctor who patiently answered questions while wiping sweat from his eyebrows. The United States Supreme Court issued an injunction against the New York Time’s theory of everything evaluation website based on a barrage of challenges from corporations that claimed the website violated their intellectual property. Another website sprang up overnight in Sweden, anonymous and hosted from compact discs. Salvador Abaroa announced a free Tribe of Akna gathering at Wrigley Field. Bakshi called. He and Jacinda had argued, and she’d taken Greta and their car and driven to the gathering in Chicago. We watched it on television. Salvador Abaroa banged his gong and advanced his theories. The world was made of squiggles, not lines, and all this time we’d only been approximating reality in the way an mp3 file approximates sound waves, or the way in which we approximate temperature, by cutting it into neat and stable increments that we mistake as absolutes. Zurich opened its arms for Kurt Schwaller’s funeral, which was interrupted by a streaker baring the logo and slogan of a diaper company. Police tackled the streaker and—for a moment—the mourners cheered. Later, an investigation of Kurt Schwaller’s Dropbox account performed in the name of international security revealed that he had deleted large amounts of files in the days leading up to his suicide. The Mossad, Bakshi told me, had been secretly monitoring Kurt Schwaller for at least the past two years because of his Palestinian sympathies and were now piecing together his computer activities by recreating his monitor displays from the detailed heat signatures they’d collected. The technology was available, Bakshi assured me. It was possible. I was more worried when Ziggy the Ohioan opossum injured his left leg. “Oh my God, what happened?” Yvette asked when she saw his bandaged limb. “You told me to be more physically active, so I tried out for the soccer team, mom,” he answered. “Did you make the team?” My wife’s breath smelled like black coffee. “No, but I sure broke my leg.” After pausing for some canned laughter, Yvette waddled obligingly toward Ziggy. “Well, you should at least have some of my homemade pasta,” she said. I made eating noises. “Do you know why they call it pasta, mom?” My wife turned from the monitor to look at me. “I don’t,” she said in her normal voice. “Because you already ate it,” I said. We laughed, concocted ever sillier plot lines and watched the webcam late into an unusually warm May night.

In June, I returned to work and Pillow joined the list of pregnant mammals now past their due dates. She ate and drank regularly, and other than waddling when she walked she was her old self. My wife started to show signs of pregnancy in June, too. It made me happy even as it reinforced the authenticity of the coming known unknown, as a former American Secretary of Defense might have called it. My wife developed the habit of posing questions in pairs: do you love me, and what do you think will happen to us? Am I the woman that as a boy you dreamed of spending your life with, and if it’s a girl do you hope she’ll be like me? Sometimes she trembled so faintly in her sleep that I wasn’t sure whether she was dreaming or in the process of waking. I pressed my body to hers and said that I wished I could share the pregnancy with her. She said that it didn’t feel like it was hers to share. She said she felt heavy. I massaged her shoulders. We kept the windows open during the day and the screen mesh out because the insects that usually invade southwestern Ontario in late May and early June hadn’t appeared. Birds and reptiles stopped laying eggs. We luxuriated in every bite of pancake that we topped with too much butter and drowned in maple syrup. We talked openly with our mouths full about the future because the world around us had let itself descend into a self-censoring limbo. The opossum webcam went dark. Bakshi dropped by the apartment one night, unannounced and in the middle of a thunderstorm. There was pain on his face. “What if what Kurt Schwaller meant was that fate was not inevitable until we made it so,” he said, sobbing. “What if our reality was a series of forking paths and by discovering the theory of everything we locked ourselves forever into one of them?” Jacinda had left him. “You’ll get her back,” I said. My wife made him a cup of tea that he drank boiling hot. He put down the cup—then picked it up and threw it against the wall. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to see if I could do something that I didn’t really want to do.” I bent down to pick up the broken pieces of porcelain. “You’ll get her back, Bakshi,” my wife said. Rain dripped onto our table from the ends of his black hair. “I don’t think so. I think we’re locked in and Kurt Schwaller took the only way out there is.” We didn’t let him go home. We discretely took all the knives from the kitchen and hid them in our bedroom, and did the same with the medicine in our bathroom, and Bakshi slept on our sofa, snoring loudly. He was still sad in the morning but felt better. We ate scrambled eggs, knowing that unless chickens started laying them again we were having a nonrenewable resource for breakfast.

Time was nonrenewable. My wife and I tried to take advantage of each second. But for every ten things we planned, we only did one. Our ambitions exceeded our abilities. On some days we were inexcusably lazy, lying in bed together until noon, and on others we worked nonstop at jobs like painting the walls, which later seemed insignificant. We considered leaving the city when the smog got too thick and renting a cottage in the country but we didn’t want to be without the safety of the nearness of hospitals and department stores. When we were scared, we made love. We ate a lot. We read short stories to each other. Outside our apartment, the world began to resemble its normal rhythms, with the exception that everywhere you went all the women were visibly pregnant. Some tried to hide it with loosely flowing clothes. Others bared their bellies with pride. I flirted with a supermarket cashier with an Ouroboros tattoo encircling her pierced belly button. After she handed me my change I asked her if she’d had it done before or after March 27. “Before,” she said. “What does it mean?” I asked. “That people have been making up weird shit for a long time and we’re still fucking here.” In Pakistan, the United Nations uncovered a mass grave of girls killed because they were pregnant—to protect the honour of their families. When I was a kid in Catholic school, my favourite saint was Saint Joseph because I wanted to love someone as much as he must have loved Mary to believe her story about a virgin birth.

On July 1, we subduably celebrated Canada Day. On July 4, my wife shook me awake at six in the morning because she was having back spasms and her stomach hurt. She got out of bed, wavered and fell and hit her head on the edge of a shelf, opening up a nasty gash. I helped her to the bathroom sink, where we washed the wound and applied a band-aid. She tried throwing up in the toilet but couldn’t. The sounds of her empty retching made me cold. The cramps got worse. I picked her up and carried her out of the apartment—Pillow whined as I closed the door—and down to the underground garage, where I helped her into the back seat of our car. Pulling out into the street, I was surprised by the amount of traffic. It was still dark out but cars were already barrelling by. On Lake Shore, the traffic was even worse. I turned on the radio and the host was in the middle of a discussion about livestock, so I turned the radio off. Farther in the city foot traffic joined car traffic and the lights couldn’t have changed more slowly. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw women collapsing on the sidewalks, clutching their stomachs. I kept my eyes ahead. At a red light, a black woman kept banging on the passenger’s side door until I rolled down the window. She asked if she could get a ride. I asked to where. “To the hospital, where else?” she said in sing-song Jamaican. I let her in and at the green light stepped as heavily on the gas as I could. In the back seat, my wife’s eyes were barely open. The Jamaican woman was in better shape. Noticing my concern, she said, “Don’t worry yourself none. I was like that this morning, too, but I’m better now. It comes and then it goes.” I was still worried. The streets around the hospital were packed with parked cars, but I found a spot by turning the wrong way up a one way street. The wheel hit the curb. I got out. The Jamaican woman helped me with my wife, and the three of us covered the distance from the car to the hospital in minutes. Ambulance sirens wailed close by. I heard the repetitive thump of helicopter blades. I glanced at my watch. 7:24. In the hospital, the hallways and waiting room were packed. There was standing room only. I left my wife leaning against a sliver of wall and ran to the reception desk. The Jamaican woman had disappeared. When I opened my mouth to speak, the receptionist cut me off: “Just take a seat, Mister, same as everybody else. Stay alert, stay calm. If you need water you can get it down the hall. We’re trying to get as many doctors down here as we can as quickly as we can, but the roads are jammed and there’s more than one hospital. That’s all I’ve been told.” I relayed the information to my wife word for word, once I found her—the waiting room was becoming encrusted with layers of incoming people—and then they shut the hospital doors—and my wife nodded, looking at me with eyes that wanted to close. I kept her lids open with my thumbs. My watch read 7:36. I wanted to tell her I loved her but was stupidly embarrassed by the presence of so many people who might laugh. I didn’t want to be cheesy. “It comes and it goes,” I said, “so just keep your eyes open for me until it goes, please.” She smiled, and I touched my lips to hers without kissing them. Her lips were dry. Around me shouts were erupting. There was a television in the corner of the waiting room, showing scenes of crowded hospitals in Sydney and Paris, and violence in Rio de Janeiro, where families huddled together in the streets while men, young and old, flung rocks, bricks and flaming bottles at a cordon of black-clad BOPE behind which politicians and their families were running from shiny cars to state-run clinics. My wife’s weak voice brought me back to the present. “What do you think happened to Monsieur Charles?” she asked. “I don’t know, but I’d guess he’s probably just getting ready for work now,” I said. She smiled and the pressure on my thumbs increased. Her eyes started to roll back into her head. “Don’t go away,” I said. “Don’t leave me.” I felt her eyes sizzle and shake like frying spheres of bacon. I couldn’t hold them open anymore. I didn’t know what to do. The shouting in the hospital had devolved into chaos. “Do you know why they call it pasta?” I said. I didn’t expect her to answer. I didn’t expect any reaction, but, “Because I already ate it,” she said, smiling—and it was the last thing she ever said, her last smile I ever saw, because in that moment there was a horrible whine that made me press my fists against my ears and in the same instant every woman in the hospital exploded.

##  **Since**

Blood, guts and bone shards blanketed the surfaces of the waiting room, making it look like the inside of an unwashed jar of strawberry jam. My wife was gone. Every woman in the room was gone. The space behind the reception desk stood eerily empty. The television in the corner was showing the splattered lens of a camera that a hand suddenly wiped clean—its burst of motion a shock to the prevailing stillness—to reveal the peaceful image of a Los Angeles street in which bloodied men and boys stood frozen, startled…

I was too numb to speak.

Someone unlocked the hospital doors but nobody entered.

The waiting room smelled like an abattoir.

My clothes smelled like an abattoir.

I walked toward the doors, opened them with my hip and continued into the morning sunlight. I half expected shit to rain down from the skies. If I had a razor blade in my pocket I would have slit my wrists, but all I had was my wallet, my car keys and my phone. Sliding my fingers over the keys reminded me how dull they were. I didn’t want to drive. I didn’t want anything, but if I had to do something I would walk. I stepped on the heel of one shoe with the toe of another and slid my shoe off. The other one I pulled off with my hand. I wasn’t wearing socks. I hadn’t had enough time to put them on. I threw the shoes away. I wanted to walk until my feet hurt so much that I couldn’t walk anymore.

I put one foot in front of the other all the way back to my apartment building, waited for the elevator, and took it to my floor. In the hall, I passed a man wearing clean summer clothes. He didn’t give my bloody ones a second glance. I nodded to him, he nodded back, and I unlocked the door to my apartment and walked in. My feet left footprints on the linoleum. A dark, drying stain in the small space between the fridge and the kitchen wall was all that was left of Pillow. She’d squeezed in and died alone. I took out a mop and rotely removed the stain. Then I took off my clothes, flung them on the bed, which was as unmade as when we left it, took a shower and laid down on the crumpled sheets beside the only pieces of my wife that I had left. My sleep smelled like an abattoir.

I awoke to a world without women.

I rolled off the bed into sore thighs and guilt, got up to emptiness that echoed the slightest noise, and left my wife’s clothes on the sheets without thinking that eventually I’d have to pack them into a plastic bag and slide them down the garbage chute. I felt magnified and hollow. In the kitchen, I used the stove top as a table because the actual table had my wife’s tablet on it, and spilled instant coffee. What I didn’t spill I drank in a few gulps, the way I used to drink ice cold milk as a boy. I stood in front of the living room window for a while before realizing I was naked, then realizing that it didn’t matter because men changed in front of each other at the pool and peed next to one another into urinals in public restrooms, and there weren’t any women to hide from, no one to offend. The world, I told myself, was now a sprawling men’s pisser, so I slammed the window open and pissed.

I wanted to call someone—to tell them that my wife was dead, because that’s a duty owed by the living—but whom could I call: her sister, her parents? Her sister was dead. Her father had a dead wife and two dead daughters. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew. I called my wife’s father anyway. Was he still my father-in-law now that I was a widower? He didn’t accept the connection. Widower: a word loses all but historical meaning when there are no alternatives. If all animals were dogs, we’d purge one of those words from our vocabulary. We were all widowers. It was synonymous with man. I switched on the television and stared, crying, at a montage of photographs showing the bloody landscapes of cities, hospitals, retirement homes, schools and churches, all under the tasteless headline: “International Pop”. Would we clean it up, these remnants of the people we loved? Could we even use the same buildings, knowing what had happened in them? The illusion of practical thinking pushed my feeling of emptiness away. I missed arms wrapping around me from behind while I stared through rain streaked windows. I missed barking and a wagging tail that hit my leg whenever I was standing too close. Happiness seemed impossible. I called Bakshi because I needed confirmation that I still had a voice. “They’re the lucky ones,” he said right after I’d introduced myself. “They’re out. We’re the fools still locked in, and now we’re all alone.”

For three weeks, I expected my wife to show up at the apartment door. I removed her clothes from the bed and stuffed them into a garbage bag, but kept the garbage bag in the small space between the fridge and the kitchen wall. I probably would have kept a dead body in the freezer if I had one and it fit. As a city and as a world, those were grim, disorganized weeks for us. Nobody worked. I don’t know what we did. Sat around and drank, smoked. And we called each other, often out of the blue. Every day, I received a call from someone I knew but hadn’t spoken to in years. The conversations all followed a pattern. There was no catching up and no explanation of lost time, just a question like “How are you holding up?” followed by a thoughtless answer (“Fine, I guess. And you?”) followed by an exchange of details about the women we’d lost. Mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends, friends, cousins, aunts, teachers, students, co-workers. We talked about the colour of their hair, their senses of humour, their favourite movies. We said nothing about ourselves, choosing instead to inhabit the personas of those whom we’d loved. In the hallway, I would put on my wife’s coats but never look at myself in the mirror. I wore her winter hats in the middle of July. Facebook became a graveyard, with the gender field separating the mourners from the dead.

The World Health Organization issued a communique stating that based on the available data it was reasonable to assume that all the women in the world were dead, but it called for any woman still alive to come forward immediately. The language of the communique was as sterile as the Earth. Nobody came forward. The World Wildlife Fund created an inventory of all mammalian species that listed in ascending order how long each species would exist. Humans were on the bottom. Both the World Health Organization and the World Wildlife Fund predicted that unless significant technological progress occurred in the field of fertility within the next fifty years, the last human, a theoretical boy named Philip born into a theoretical developed country on March 26, 2025, would die in 93 years. On the day of his death, Philip would be the last remaining mammal—although not necessarily animal—on Earth. No organization or government has ever officially stated that July 4, 2025, was the most destructive day in recorded history, on the morning of which, Eastern Time, four billion out of a total of eight billion people ceased to exist as anything more than memories. What killed them was neither an act of war nor an act of terrorism. Neither was it human negligence. There was no one to blame and no one to prosecute. In the western countries, where the majority of people no longer believed in any religion, we could not even call it an act of God. So we responded by calling it nothing at all.

And, like nothing, our lives persisted. We ate, we slept and we adapted. After the first wave of suicides ended, we hosed off what the rain hadn’t already washed away and began to reorganize the systems on which our societies ran. It was a challenge tempered only slightly in countries where women had not made up a significant portion of the workforce. We held new elections, formed new boards of directors and slowed down the assembly lines and bus schedules to make it possible for our communities to keep running. There was less food in the supermarkets, but we also needed less food. Instead of two trains we ran one, but one sufficed. I don’t remember the day when I finally took the black garbage bag from its resting place and walked it to the chute. “How are you holding up?” a male voice would say on the street. “Fine, I guess. And you?” I’d answer. ##!! wrote a piece of Python code to predict the box office profitability of new movies, in which real actors played alongside computer-generated actresses. The code was only partially successful. Because while it did accurately predict the success of new movies in relation to one other, it failed to include the overwhelming popularity of re-releases of films from the past—films starring Bette Davis, Giulietta Masina, Meryl Streep: women who at least on screen were still flesh and blood. Theatres played retrospectives. On Amazon, books by female authors topped the charts. Sales of albums by women vocalists surged. We thirsted for another sex. I watched, read and listened like everyone else, and in between I cherished any media on which I found images or recordings of my wife. I was angry for not having made more. I looked at the same photos and watched the same clips over and over again. I memorized my wife’s Facebook timeline and tagged all her Tweets by date, theme and my own rating. When I went out, I would talk to the air as if she was walking beside me, sometimes quoting her actual words as answers to my questions and sometimes inventing my own as if she was a beloved character in an imagined novel. When people looked at me like I was crazy, I didn’t care. I wasn’t the only one. But, more importantly, my wife meant more to me than they did. I remembered times when we’d stroll through the park or down downtown sidewalks and I would be too ashamed to kiss her in the presence of strangers. Now, I would tell her that I love her in the densest crowd. I would ask her whether I should buy ketchup or mustard in the condiments aisle. She helped me pick out my clothes in the morning. She convinced me to eat healthy and exercise.

In November, I was in Bakshi’s apartment for the first time, waiting for a pizza delivery boy, when one of Bakshi’s friends who was browsing Reddit told us that the Tribe of Akna was starting a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to buy the Republic of Suriname, rename it Xibalba and close its borders for all except the enlightened. Xibalba would have no laws, Salvador Abaroa said in a message on the site. He was banging his gong as he did. Everything would be legal, and anyone who pledged $100 would receive a two-week visa to this new "Mayan Buddhist Eden". If you pledged over $10,000, you would receive citizenship. “Everything in life is destroyed by energy,” Abaroa said. “But let the energy enlighten you before it consumes your body. Xibalba is finite life unbound.” Bakshi’s phone buzzed. The pizza boy had sent an email. He couldn’t get upstairs, so Bakshi and I took the elevator to the building’s front entrance. The boy’s face was so white that I saw it as soon as the elevator doors slid open. Walking closer, I saw that he was powdered. His cheeks were also rouged, and he was wearing cranberry coloured lipstick, a Marilyn Monroe wig and a short black skirt. Compared to his face, his thin legs looked like incongruously dark popsicle sticks. Bakshi paid for the pizza and added another five dollars for the tip. The boy batted his fake eyelashes and asked if maybe he could do something to earn a little more. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I could come upstairs and clean the place up a little. You two live alone?” Bakshi passed me the two pizza boxes—They felt hot in my hands.—and dug around in his wallet. “It’s not just the two of us,” I said. The boy smiled. “That’s OK. I’ve done parties before if that’s what you’re into.” I saw the reaction on Bakshi’s face, and I saw the boy’s grotesque caricature of a woman. “There’s condoms and lube in the car,” the boy said, pointing to a sedan with a pizza spray-painted across its side parked by the curb. “My boss says I can take up to two hours but it’s not like he uses a stopwatch.” I stepped on Bakshi’s foot and shouldered him away. He was still fiddling with his wallet. “We’re not interested,” I said to the boy. He just shrugged. “Suit yourselves. If you change your mind, order another pizza and ask for Ruby.” The elevator dinged and the doors opened. As we shuffled inside, I saw Bakshi’s cheeks turn red. “I’m not actually—” he mumbled, but I didn’t let him finish. What had bothered me so much about the boy wasn’t the way he looked or acted; in fact, it wasn’t really the boy at all. He was just trying to make a buck. What bothered me was how ruthlessly we’d already begun to exploit each other.

For those of us who were heterosexual, sex was a definite weakness. I missed it. I would never have it with a woman again. The closest substitute was pornography, whose price rose with its popularity, but which, at least for me, now came scented with the unpleasantness of historicity and nostalgia. Videos and photos, not to mention physical magazines, were collector’s items in the same way that we once collected coins or action figures. The richest men bought up the exclusive rights to their favourite porn stars and guarded them by law with a viciousness once reserved for the RIAA and MPAA. Perhaps exclusivity gave them a possessive satisfaction. In response, we pirated whatever we could and fought for a pornographic public domain. Although new pornography was still being produced, either with the help of the same virtual technology they used for mainstream movies or with the participation of young men in costume, it lacked the taste of the originals. It was like eating chocolate made without cocoa. The best pornography, and therefore the best sex, became the pornography of the mind.

The Tribe of Akna reached its Kickstarter goal in early December. On December 20, I went to church for the first time since getting married because that was the theoretical date that my wife—along with every other woman—was supposed to have given birth. I wanted to be alone with others. Someone posted a video on TikTok from Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, dubbing over Marlon Brando’s speech to say: “You don’t understand. I could’a had a piece of ass. I could’a been a school board member. I could’a been a son’s daddy”. It was juvenile and heartbreaking. By Christmas, the Surinamese government was already expelling its citizens, each of whom had theoretically been given a fraction of the funds paid to the government from the Tribe of Akna’s Kickstarter pool, and Salvador Abaroa’s lawyers were petitioning for international recognition of the new state of Xibalba. Neither Canada nor the United States opened diplomatic relations, but others did. I knew people who had pledged money, and when in January they disappeared on trips, I had no doubt to where. Infamy spread in the form of stories and urban legends. There’s no need for details. People disappeared, and ethicists wrote about the ethical neutrality of murder, arguing that because we were all slated to die, leaving the Earth barren in a century, destruction was a human inevitability, and what is inevitable can never be bad, even when it comes earlier than expected—even when it comes by force. Because, as a species, we hadn’t chosen destruction for ourselves, neither should any individual member of our species be able to choose now for himself. To the ethicists of what became known as the New Inevitability School, suicide was a greater evil than murder because it implied choice and inequality. If the ship was going down, no one should be allowed to get off. A second wave of suicides coincided with the debate, leading many governments to pass laws making suicide illegal. But how do you punish someone who already wants to die? In China: by keeping him alive and selling him to Xibalba, where he becomes the physical plaything of its citizens and visa-holders. The Chinese was the first embassy to open in Xibalban Paramaribo.

The men working on Kurt Schwaller’s theory of everything continued working, steadily adding new variables to their equations, complicating their calculations in the hopes that someday the variable they added would be the final one and the equation would yield an answer. “It’s pointless,” Bakshi would comment after reading about one of the small breakthroughs they periodically announced. “Even if they do manage to predict something, anything, it won’t amount to anything more than the painfully obvious. And after decades of adding and subtracting their beans, they’ll come out of their Los Alamos datalabs like groundhogs into a world blanketed by storm clouds and conclude, finally and with plenty of self-congratulations, that it’s about to fucking rain.”

It rained a lot in February. It was one of the warmest Februaries in Toronto’s history. Sometimes I went for walks along the waterfront, talking to my wife, listening to Billie Holiday and trying to recall as many female faces as I could. Ones from the distant past: my mother, my grandmothers. Ones from the recent past: the woman whose life my wife saved on the way to the hospital, the Armenian woman with the film magazine and the injured son, the Jamaican woman, Bakshi’s wife. I focused on their faces, then zoomed out to see their bodies. I carried an umbrella but seldom opened it because the pounding of the raindrops against the material distorted my mental images. I saw people rush across the street holding newspapers above their heads while dogs roamed the alleyways wearing nothing at all. Of the two, it was dogs that had the shorter time left on Earth, and if they could let the rain soak their fur and drip off their bodies, I could surely let it run down my face. It was first my mother and later my wife who told me to always cover up in the rain, “because moisture causes colds,” but I was alone now and I didn’t want to be separated from the falling water by a sheet of glass anymore. I already was cold. I saw a man sit down on a bench, open his briefcase, pack rocks into it, then close it, tie it to his wrist, check his watch and start to walk into the polluted waters of Lake Ontario. Another man took out his phone and tapped his screen a few times. The man in the lake walked slowly, savouring each step. When the police arrived, sirens blaring, the water was up to his neck. I felt guilty for watching the three officers splash into the lake after him. I don’t know what happened after that because I turned my back and walked away. I hope they didn’t stop him. I hope he got to do what he wanted to do.

“Screw the police.” Bakshi passed me a book. “You should read this,” he said. It was by a professor of film and media studies at a small university in Texas. There was a stage on the cover, flanked by two red curtains. The photo had been taken from the actors’ side, looking out at an audience that the stage lights made too dark to see. The title was Hiding Behind The Curtains. I flipped the book over. There was no photo of the author. “It’s a theory,” Bakshi said, “that undercuts what Abaroa and the Inevitabilists are saying. It’s a little too poetic in parts but—listen, you ever read Atlas Shrugged?” I said I hadn’t. “Well, anyway, what this guy says is that what if instead of our situation letting us do anything we want, it’s actually the opposite, a test to see how we act when we only think that we’re doomed. I mean what if the women who died in March, what if they’re just—” “Hiding behind the curtains,” I said. He bit his lower lip. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that but, as a metaphor, it has a kind of elegance, right?” I flipped through the book, reading a few sentences at random. It struck me as neo-Christian. “Isn’t this a little too spiritual for you? I thought we were all locked into one path,” I said. “I thought that, too, but lately I’ve been able to do things—things that I didn’t really want to do.” For a second I was concerned. “Nothing bad,” he said. “I mean I’ve felt like I’m locked into doing one thing, say having a drink of water, but I resist and pour myself a glass of orange juice instead.” I shook my head. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. That’s how most theories ended, I thought: reason and evidence up to a crucial point, and then it gets so personal that it’s hard to explain. You either make the jump or you don’t. “Just read it,” he said. “Please read it. You don’t have to agree with it, I just want to get your opinion, an objective opinion.”

I never did read the book, and Bakshi forgot about it, too, but that day he was excited and happy, and those were rare feelings. I was simultaneously glad for him and jealous. Afterwards, we went out onto the balcony and drank Czech beer until morning. When it got cool, we put on our coats. It started to drizzle so we wore blue plastic suits like the ones they used to give you on boat rides in Niagara Falls. When it was time to go home, I was so drunk I couldn’t see straight. I almost got into a fight, the first one of my life, because I bumped into a man on the street and told him to get the fuck out of my way. I don’t remember much more of my walk home. The only reason I remember Behind The Curtains at all is because when I woke up in the afternoon it was the first thing that my hung over brain recognized. It was lying on the floor beside the bed. Then I opened the blinds covering my bedroom window and, through my spread fingers that I’d meant to use as a shield from the first blast of daylight, I saw the pincers for the first time.

They’d appeared while I was asleep. I turned on the television and checked my phone. The media and the internet were feverish, but nobody knew what the thing was, just a massive, vaguely rectangular shape blotting out a strip of the sky. NASA stated that it had received no extraterrestrial messages to coincide with the appearance. Every government claimed ignorance. The panel discussions on television only worsened my headache. Bakshi emailed me links to photos from Mumbai, Cape Town, Sydney and Mexico City, all showing the same shape; or rather one of a pair of shapes, for there were two of them, one on each side of the Earth, and they’d trapped our planet between themselves like gargantuan fingers clutching an equally gargantuan ping-pong ball. That’s why somebody came up with the term “the pincers”. It stuck. Because I’d slept in last night’s clothes I was already dressed, so I ran down the stairs and out of my apartment building to get a better look at them from the parking lot. You’re not supposed to look at the sun, but I wasn’t the only one breaking that rule. There were entire crowds with upturned faces in the streets. If the pincers, too, could see, they would perhaps be as baffled by us as we were of them: billions of tiny specks all over the surface of this ping-pong ball gathering in points on a grid, coagulating into large puddles that vanished overnight only to reassemble in the morning. In the following days, scientists scrambled to study the pincers and their potential effects on us, but they discovered nothing. The pincers did nothing. They emitted nothing, consumed nothing. They simply were. And they could not be measured or detected in any way other than by eyesight. When we shot rays at them, the rays continued on their paths unaffected, as if nothing was there. The pincers did, however, affect the sun’s rays coming towards us. They cut up our days. The sun would rise, travel over the sky, hide behind a pincer—enveloping us in a second night—before revealing itself again as a second day. But if the pincers’ physical effect on us was limited to its blockage of light, their mental effects on us were astoundingly severe. For many, this was the sign they’d been waiting for. It brought hope. It brought gloom. It broke and confirmed ideas that were hard to explain. In their ambiguity, the pincers could be anything, but in their strangeness they at least reassured us of the reality of the strange times in which we were living. Men walked away from the theory of everything, citing the pincers as the ultimate variable that proved the futility of prognostication. Others took up the calculations because if the pincers could appear, what else was out there in our future? However, ambiguity can only last for a certain period. Information narrows possibilities. On April 1, 2026, every Twitter account in the world received the following message:

as you can see this message is longer than the allowed one hundred forty characters time and space are malleable you thought you had one hundred years but prepare for the plucking

The sender was @. The message appeared in each user’s feed at exactly the same time and in his first language, without punctuation. Because of the date most of us thought it was a hoax, but the developers of Twitter denied this vehemently. It wasn’t until a court forced them to reveal their code, which proved that a message of that length and sent by a blank user was impossible, that our doubts ceased. ##!! took bets on what the message meant. Salvador Abaroa broadcast a response into space in a language he called Bodhi Mayan, then addressed the rest of us in English, saying that in the pincers he had identified an all-powerful prehistoric fire deity, described in an old Sanskrit text as having the resemblance of mirrored black fangs, whose appearance signified the end of time. “All of us will burn,” he said, “but paradise shall be known only to those who burn willingly.” Two days later, The Tribe of Akna announced that in one month it would seal Xibalba from the world and set fire to everything and everyone in it. For the first time, its spokesman said, an entire nation would commit suicide as one. Jonestown was but a blip. As a gesture of goodwill, he said that Xibalba was offering free immolation visas to anyone who applied within the next week. The New Inevitability School condemned the plan as “offensively unethical” and inequalitist and urged an international Xibalban boycott. Nothing came of it. When the date arrived, we watched with rapt attention on live streams and from the vantage points of circling news planes as Salvador Abaroa struck flint against steel, creating the spark that caught the char cloth, starting a fire that blossomed bright crimson and in the next weeks consumed all 163,821 square kilometres of the former Republic of Suriname and all 2,500,000 of its estimated Xibalban inhabitants. Despite concerns that the fire would spread beyond Xibalba’s borders, The Tribe of Akna had been careful. There were no accidental casualties and no unplanned property damage. No borders were crossed. Once the fire burned out, reporters competed to be first to capture the mood on the ground. Paramaribo resembled the smouldering darkness of a fire pit.

It was a few days later while sitting on Bakshi’s balcony, looking up at the pincers and rereading a reproduction of @’s message—someone had spray-painted it across the wall of a building opposite Bakshi’s—that I remembered Iris. The memory was so absorbing that I didn’t notice when Bakshi slid open the balcony door and sat down beside me, but I must have been smiling because he said, “I don’t mean this the wrong way, but you look a little loony tonight. Seriously, man, you do not look sufficiently freaked out.” I’d remembered Iris before, swirling elements of her plain face, but now I also remembered her words and her theory. I turned to Bakshi, who seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and said, “Let’s get up on the roof of this place.” He grabbed my arm and held on tightly. “I’m not going to jump, if that’s what you mean.” It wasn’t what I meant, but I asked, “why not?” He said, “I don’t know. I know we’re fucked as a species and all that, but I figure if I’m still alive I might as well see what happens next, like in a bad movie you want to see through to the end.” I promised him that I wasn’t going to jump, either. Then I scrambled inside his apartment, grabbed my hat and jacket from the closet by the front door and put them on while speed walking down the hall, toward the fire escape. I realized I’d been spending a lot of time here. The alarm went off as soon I pushed open the door with my hip but I didn’t care. When Bakshi caught up with me, I was already outside, leaping up two stairs at a time. The metal construction was rusted. The treads wobbled. On the roof, the wind nearly blew my hat off and it was so loud I could have screamed and no one would have heard me. Holding my hat in my hands, I crouched and looked out over the twinkling city spread out in front of me. It looked alive in spite of the pincers in the sky. “Let’s do something crazy,” I yelled. Bakshi was still catching his breath behind me. “What, like this isn’t crazy enough?” The NHL may have been gone but my hat still bore the Maple Leafs logo, as quaint and obsolete by then as the Weimar Republic in the summer of 1945. “When’s the last time you played ball hockey?” I asked. Bakshi crouched beside me. “You’re acting weird. And I haven’t played ball hockey in ages.” I stood up so suddenly that Bakshi almost fell over. This time I knew I was smiling. “So call your buddies,” I said. “Tell them to bring their sticks and their gear and to meet us in front of the ACC in one hour.” Bakshi patted me on the back. Toronto shone like jewels scattered over black velvet. “The ACC’s been closed for years, buddy. I think you’re really starting to lose it.” I knew it was closed. “Lose what?” I asked. “It’s closed and we’re going to break in.”

The chains broke apart like shortbread. The electricity worked. The clouds of dust made me sneeze. We used duffel bags to mark out the goals. We raced up and down the stands and bent over, wheezing at imaginary finish lines. We got into the announcer’s booth and called each other cunts through the microphone. We ran, fell and shot rubber pucks for hours. We didn’t keep score. We didn’t worry. “What about the police?” someone asked. The rest of us answered: “Screw the fucking police!”

And when everybody packed up and went home, I stayed behind.

“Are you sure you’re fine?” Bakshi asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Because I have to get back so that I can shower, get changed and get to work.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“And you promise me you’ll catch a cab?”

“I’m not suicidal.”

He fixed his grip on his duffel bag. “I didn’t say you were. I was just checking.”

“I want to see the end of the movie, too,” I said.

He saluted. I watched him leave. When he was gone, my wife walked down from the nosebleeds and took a seat beside me. “There’s someone I want to tell you about,” I said. She lifted her chin like she always does when something unexpected catches her interest, and scooted closer. I put my arm across the back of her beautiful shoulders. She always liked that, even though the position drives me crazy because I tend to talk a lot with my hands. “Stuck at Leafs-Wings snorefest,” she said. “Game sucks but I love the man sitting beside me.” (January 15, 2019. Themes: hockey, love, me. Rating: 5/5). “Her name was Iris,” I said.

##  **Iris**

“What if the whole universe was a giant garden—like a hydroponics thing, like how they grow tomatoes and marijuana, so there wouldn’t need to be any soil, all the nutrients would just get injected straight into the seeds or however they do it—or, even better, space itself was the soil, you know how they talk about dark matter being this invisible and mysterious thing that exists out there and we don’t know what it does, if it actually affect anything, gravity…”

She blew a cloud of pot smoke my way that made me cough and probably gave her time to think. She said, “So dark matter is like the soil, and in this space garden of course they don’t grow plants but something else.”

“Galaxies?”

“Eyes.”

“Just eyes, or body parts in general?” I asked.

“Just eyes.”

The music from the party thumped. “But the eyes are our planets, like Mars is an eye, Neptune is an eye, and the Earth is an eye, maybe even the best eye.”

“The best for what? Who’s growing them?”

“God,” she said.

I took the joint from her and took a long drag. “I didn’t know you believed in God.”

“I don’t, I guess—except when I’m on dope. Anyway, you’ve got to understand me because when I say God I don’t mean like the old man with muscles and a beard. This God, the one I’m talking about, it’s more like a one-eyed monster.”

“Like a cyclops?” I asked.

“Yeah, like that, like a cyclops. So it’s growing these eyes in the dark matter in space—I mean right now, you and me, we’re literally sitting on one of these eyes and we’re contributing to its being grown because the nutrients the cyclops God injected into them, that’s us.”

“Why does God need so many extra eyes?”

“It’s not a question of having so many of them, but more about having the right one, like growing the perfect tomato.” I gave her back the joint and leaned back, looking at the stars. “Because every once in a while the cyclops God goes blind, its eye stops working—not in the same way we go blind, because the cyclops God doesn’t see reality in the same way we see reality—but more like we see through our brains and our eyes put together.”

“Like x-ray vision?” I asked.

“No, not like that at all,” she said.

“A glass eye?”

“Glass eyes are fake.”

“OK,” I said, “so maybe try something else. Give me a different angle. Tell me what role we’re playing in all of this because right now it seems that we’re pretty insignificant. I mean, you said we’re nutrients but what’s the difference between, say, Mars and Earth in terms of being eyes?”

She looked over at me. “Are you absolutely sure you want to hear about this?”

“I am,” I said.

“You don’t think it’s stupid?”

“Compared to what?”

“I don’t know, just stupid in general.”

“I don’t.”

“I like you,” she said.

“Because I don’t think you’re stupid?” I asked.

“That’s just a bonus. I mean more that you’re up here with me instead of being down there with everyone, and we’re talking and even though we’re not in love I know somehow we’ll never forget each other for as long as we live.”

“It’s hard to forget being on the surface of a giant floating eyeball.”

“You’re scared that you won’t find anyone to love,” she said suddenly, causing me to nearly choke on my own saliva. “Don’t ask me how I know—I just do. But before I go any further about the cyclops God, I want you to know that you’ll find someone to love and who’ll love you back, and whatever happens you’ll always have that because no one can take away the past.”

“You’re scared of going blind,” I said.

“I am going blind.”

“Not yet.”

“And I’m learning not to be scared because everything I see until that day will always belong to me.”

“The doctors said it would be gradual,” I reminded her.

“That’s horrible.”

“Why?”

“Because you wouldn’t want to find someone to love and then know that every day you wake up the love between you grows dimmer and dimmer, would you?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you much rather feel the full strength of that love up to and including in the final second before the world goes black?”

“It would probably be painful to lose it all at once like that.”

“Painful because you actually had something to lose. For me, I know I can’t wish away blindness, but I sure wish that the last image I ever see—in that final second before my world goes black—is the most vivid and beautiful image of all.”

Because I didn’t know what to say to that, I mumbled: “I’m sorry.”

“That I’m going blind?”

“Yeah, and that we can’t grow eyes.”

This time I looked over, and she was the one gazing at the stars. “Before, you asked if we were insignificant,” she said. “But because you’re sorry—that’s kind of why we’re the most significant of all, why Earth is better than the other planets.”

“For the cyclops God?”

“Yes.”

“He cares about my feelings?”

“Not in the way you’re probably thinking, but in a different way that’s exactly what the cyclops God cares about most because that’s what it’s looking for in an eye. All the amazing stuff we’ve ever built, all our ancient civilizations and supercomputers and cities you can see from the Moon—that’s just useless cosmetics to the cyclops God, except in how all of it has made us feel about things that aren’t us.”

“I think you’re talking about morality.”

“I think so, too.”

“So by feeling sorry for you I’m showing compassion, and the cyclops God likes compassion?”

“That’s not totally wrong but it’s a little upside down. We have this black matter garden and these planets the cyclops God has grown as potential eyes to replace its own eye once it stops working, but its own eye is like an eye and a brain mixed together. Wait—” she said.

I waited.

“Imagine a pair of tinted sunglasses.”

I imagined green-tinted ones.

“Now imagine that instead of the lenses being a certain colour, they’re a certain morality, and if you wear the glasses you see the world tinted according to that morality.”

I was kind of able to imagine that. I supposed it would help show who was good and who was bad. “But the eye and the tinted glasses are the same thing in this case.”

“Exactly, there’s no one without the other, and what makes the tint special is us—not that the cyclops God cares at all about individuals any more than we care about individual honey bees. That’s why he’s kind of a monster.”

“Isn’t people’s morality always changing, though?”

“Only up to a point. Green is green even when you have a bunch of shades of it, and a laptop screen still works fine even with a few dead pixels, right? And the more globalized and connected we get, the smoother our morality gets, but if you’re asking more about how our changing morals work when the cyclops God finally comes to take its eye, I assume it has a way to freeze our progress. To cut our roots. Then it makes some kind of final evaluation. If it’s satisfied it takes the planet and sticks it into its eye socket, and if it doesn’t like us then it lets us alone, although because we’re frozen and possibly rootless I suppose we die—maybe that’s what the other planets are, so many of them in space without any sort of life. Cold, rejected eyes.”

From sunglasses to bees to monitors in three metaphors, and now we were back to space. This was getting confusing. The stars twinkled, some of them dead, too: their light still arriving at our eyes from sources that no longer existed. “That’s kind of depressing,” I said to end the silence.

“What about it?”

“Being bees,” I said, “that work for so long at tinting a pair of glasses just so that a cyclops God can try them on.”

“I don’t think it’s any more depressing than being a tomato.”

“I’ve never thought about that.”

“You should. It’s beautiful, like love,” she said. “Because if you think about it, being a tomato and being a person are really quite similar. They’re both about growing and existing for the enjoyment of someone else. As a tomato you’re planted, you grow and mature and then an animal comes along and eats you. The juicier you look and the nicer you smell, the greater the chance that you’ll get plucked but also the more pleasure the animal will get from you. As a person, you’re also born and you grow up and you mature into a one of a kind personality with a one of a kind face, and then someone comes along and makes you fall in love with them and all the growing you did was really just for their enjoyment of your love.”

“Except love lasts longer than chewing a tomato.”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“And you have to admit that two tomatoes can’t eat each other the way two people can love each other mutually.”

“I admit that’s a good point,” she said.

“And what happens to someone who never gets fallen in love with?”

“The same thing that happens to a tomato that never gets eaten or an eye that the cyclops God never takes. They die and they rot, and they darken and harden, decomposing until they don’t look like tomatoes anymore. It’s not a nice fate. I’d rather live awhile and get eaten, to be honest.”

“As a tomato or person?”

“Both.”

I thought for a few seconds. “That explanation works for things on Earth, but nothing actually decomposes in space.”

“That’s why there are so many dead planets,” she said.


	36. I think you.

It began with a Mr Parsons in Edinburgh, an elderly lawyer who, upon placing his customary hat upon his head, discovered the hat was unexplainably too large. Later that same day, while hat-less and at work, he took his customary bathroom break and noticed that a small growth had sprouted from his inner thigh.

He made nothing of it for the time being, and certainly did not connect the odd events.

Over the next months, many people around the world independently made similar discoveries, a diminution of the head and the emergence of a strange growth, called variously—albeit erroneously—a cyst, a skin tag, a pimple, a tumor, a boil, _etc_.

My head remained the same size and I developed no growths.

Soon, internet communities sprang up, e.g. myheadisshrinking.com, /wtfisthisfuckinggrowth, in which people shared stories of similar observations, and observations they were, for it was all verifiable. You could measure your head and your growth. If you saw your doctor, the doctor could not deny the physical reality, only offer _some kind_ of explanation. It was not the fault of the medical profession that it grasped so lamely at straws and provided wrong diagnoses.

Eventually two conclusions were made: that the increase in the size of each growth was proportional to the decrease in the size of each head, and that as people’s heads shrank, their intelligence diminished.

I became aware of being surrounded by idiots.

By year’s end, the world’s population had heads the size of softballs—grotesque balding ovoids of cubistically rearranged facial features—and melon-sized flesh sacks emanating from their bodies, making communication and locomotion increasingly difficult. These disturbing creatures babbled, drooled, slumbered and ate.

I was the exception.

The voice spoke to me one night in a deep REM sleep, speaking words I can describe only as smelling of bergamot and vetiver.

 _Meet us in Atlantis on the mindful ocean_ , it communicated.

The same sentence began appearing in unexpected places: in emails from no one, repeated on the page of a book, in pop songs, on billboards, and as a tattoo on my forearm.

The meaning remained a mystery—

until that fateful day when Earth experienced its simultaneous noon, the oceans boiled and evaporated, and everyone’s head condensed into nothingness while their growths, now bulbous, wispy-haired and veiny, detached from their bodies and rolled obediently to the floor of what but yesterday was the Atlantic.

There: they popped.

And their oozing, organic fragments trembled before congealing into a single, throbbing mass of gelatinous consciousness!

I understood the message.

I arrived in New York and from there walked upon the pulsating softness to Atlantis.

He awaited.

We sat cross-legged across from one another and meditated.

My eyes closed, I felt myself gently descending, and when it was done I was seated upon the desiccated ocean floor, and where my head once was there now palpitated a tremendous sphere of the entirety of humanity’s head-matter!

How heavy it was. How delicately balanced.

_Imagination itself._

I could think anything _and it was_.

I close(d) my eyes.

I think you.


	37. Quiet! The vents are working...

Ever notice the vents? Yeah, some of them blow hot air and others cold, air-conditioned air, but there are those that don't blow any air at all.

They just _are_.

Little inconspicuous holes in the walls. There are a few in the office building where I work. Grated, forgotten. Normalized and hidden in plain sight, as they say.

Then again, as _who_ says?

Because there's no one you can question about these things _if you start to have doubts_.

Co-workers don't care. Supervisor says he'll look into it but never does. Management says they're _just vents_ , as if that answers the question.

When I contacted the building owners, suggesting a fault ("because no air blows"), I got a message back saying some vents are just _control vents_ , not for the blowing of air.

The next day I was summoned by management. "Why are you contacting the building owners directly? All communication must go through management."

So ask yourself: Is this normal? _The fuck are these vents for?_

I've paid careful attention to them over the past few years, and I think I know. Oh, I think I know the truth about these awful, grated holes in the wall.

The building owners weren't lying.

These aren't blow-holes.

They're suck-holes.

Slowly, quietly and almost imperceptibly they work, day by day, hour by hour, minute by fucking silent minute, sucking away our souls.

The pressure is so slight you don't usually feel it.

But it's there, in those eerie moments when the hairs on your arms stand suddenly on end, or late in the day, when it gets uncomfortably quiet, and you can hear that gentle hum of _who knows what_ somewhere in the world.

Now you know what.

The vents sucking on you— _on all of us._

But even more than that. Sucking you and us away, siphoning off our very essence like some kind of goddamn spiritual vacuum cleaner with vents for mouths. Monolithic and ubiquitous.

Ever wonder why you feel so tired at the end of the day _even when you haven't done a fucking thing_? 

Or so much more apathetic about every aspect of your life even though you struggle to find anything _real_ to complain about?

It's not aging.

It's not a natural process.

It's the soul sucking.

The perversity of it is they play it back for you. The essence they suck, they learn from it, then they rearrange it and stream it for you on Netflix as parody. What's your favourite show? That's _your_ life regurgitated. Self-sustenance through spiritual auto-cannibalism.

There's even a way to see the sucking of the vents.

All you've got to do is colour your thoughts. Make them weird, unusual. Give them a tinge of the extraordinary to make them stand out against the greyness of our modern lives. Then sit and watch as the colours spiral faintly out of you, flowing slowly but continually past the unassuming grates, and into the vent-beyond.


	38. The Tale of Bunny-Rabid

Bunny-Rabid lived happily alone in a deep hole in the woods that was made by a meteor that hit the world a long time ago.

For centuries he was undisturbed.

He was so elusive he didn't figure in myth or fairy tale.

But one day a developer bought the wild land on which Bunny-Rabid lived, and began sending surveyors and workmen into the woods.

Bunny-Rabid disliked this.

He clawed the surveyors to fleshy shreds and performed black magic on the workmen until their sanity turned inside out and they could no longer continue their work.

The developer reported to the police, who duly investigated the surveyors' grisly deaths, but their findings were inconclusive and they soon gave up.

The invertedly-sane workmen, however, gabbled in their snugly fitting straightjackets about an evil bunnyman who performed horror spells in the woods.

One day, a doctor recorded their gabblings and published them in a book called _The Evil Bunnyman and Other Modern Terrors_.

A cryptozoologist read the book, gathered a team and ventured into the woods. He brought his son, Charlie.

For weeks the team traversed the wilderness, examining and recording their findings. They were about to turn back when they came upon a hole.

This was Bunny-Rabid's meteor hole, and he disliked that the cryptozoologist had found it.

Bunny-Rabid waited until dark, then cast a stream of fire out of the meteor hole and emerged in its unsteady, burning light, holding tightly his bone-staff, which curled at the end like a monstrous hook, and spoke the words of insanity into the terrified faces of the cryptozoologist and his team.

They were ill-prepared to hear the swirling speech of whispers as Bunny-Rabid's gaunt and liquid face scrambled and spun so that his crooked eyes began orbiting his ossified nose, and his ancient maw snarled itself into a string of fangs which encircled his head like a crown of yellowed thorns.

They all went mad.

Except Charlie, who smiled.

It was a hideous smile, full of tenderness and warmth, and it made Bunny-Rabid shiver.

In the nighttime woods behind, the mad ones ran head-long into trees and screamed and murdered one another with their cryptozoology equipment and their bare hands.

But Charlie stepped toward Bunny-Rabid and—horror of unmentionable horrors!—hugged him.

Charlie was mute but Bunny-Rabid heard the boy's thoughts.

In fact, he couldn't silence them.

And he could not invert the little human's sanity.

"You killed my father," Charlie was thinking, "so from today you are my father, and I am your little bunny son. You will teach me the black magic and other bunny ways, and together we shall live in the meteor hole in the woods."

 _No!_ Bunny-Rabid thundered. _Never! Such unnature cannot be!_

Yet it was.

Charlie was impervious to all Bunny-Rabid's spells and violence, and he followed Bunny-Rabid through the woods, thinking his thoughts aloud, day after dreadful day, until Bunny-Rabid grudgingly agreed.

And that is how Bunny-Rabid finally became a father, for which we shall all pay dearly.


	39. Szandra, My Old Friend

When I was in high school, I took the bus to school. Not the school bus—the city bus: Number 61, which ran from the suburbs to the city centre.

I took an early one because it was less crowded, and got off several stops short to listen to podcasts while walking the rest of the way. It was my favourite part of the day, strolling timelessly between the giant warehouses, before the daily bullying inevitably began. In the afternoons I repeated the route in reverse, and it was while waiting for the bus that I met Szandra.

She looked sixty and always wore the same clothes, patched black jacket, leather boots and jeans, no matter the weather. She never wore a hat, even in the winter, and her long, greying hair fluttered wildly in the slightest breeze.

The first times we saw each other we didn't say a word. But weeks passed and we remained the only two people at the bus stop, and eventually we started talking. First small talk, then more. I found out her name, that she was Hungarian and that she worked in a nearby sporting goods warehouse.

Although we were separated by almost every metric imaginable (age, sex, ethnicity) we understood each other perfectly. She told me about her life in Hungary and how she had come to Canada alone, and I told her about my lonely home life and the bullying I suffered at school.

We sat beside each other on the bus and talked the whole ride. Although I loved my podcasts, I sacrificed them gladly for conversations with Szandra.

Around the middle of Grade 11, the bullying worsened. It stopped being incidental. They started seeking me out. And it morphed into harassment, then clear physical abuse. I had gotten used to emotional terror, but now that combined with threats of real violence. On the day it happened, I spent the last forty minutes of the day naked in the locker room as four classmates took turns beating me.

I ran to the bus stop in tears.

_Ashamed._

_Hurt._

And they ran after me.

When the bus came, Szandra and I got on—and the bullies piled in after us. They sat in the back, sending texts saying they would find out where I live.

Szandra saw my tears, the swelling developing on my face. I told her what happened. "I'm afraid they'll never stop," I said.

That's when:

Szandra closed her eyes, humming—

The bus became a swamp, sunless, pervaded by a dull, illuminating fog of oppressive dread through which sprouted the black jagged branches of dead trees, on one of which:

Four flayed bodies swinging:

On the bus:

Silence pregnant with realization. Screaming of public transiters. Squealing of tires as the bus itself came skidding to a halt. And we all saw the four skinned bodies hanging impossibly from the ceiling of the bus. Dead, horrified.

Beside me. Szandra. Eyes open.

Heart. Beating.

_"They stop."_

Szandra—the witch.

Szandra—my old friend.


	40. A Brief History of the Revolution (Told in Reverse)

Preobrazhensky wiped tears from his eyes as blood began to drip from the faucet.

# \- - -

The water treatment facility was abuzz with engineers and excitement on this cold Moscow morning. The counter-revolutionaries had held it for months, imbuing it with a defiant symbolism which their defeat had so beautifully transformed into a symbol of victory for the revolution. All eyes were on the work being done here, and that work was progressing.

Already, undesirable elements (bourgeoisie, intellectuals, kulaks) were being rounded up, and the bleeding chambers had been constructed and fitted into the existing infrastructure. In essence, the plant's inputs were being switched. As trumpeted by official propaganda, yesterday's enemies would become tomorrow's lifeblood—literally: entire masses kept like cattle, given just enough nourishment to keep them alive so that their treacherous hearts could pump blood for the world's first vampiric state, The Union of Vampire Socialist Republics.

Moscow's would be first of hundreds of such facilities. The model on which the success of the others would depend.

The revolution had promised the flow of blood.

The revolution must deliver.

Preobrazhensky knew that what this really meant was that he, newly-appointed Minister of Hemo- and Agriculture, must deliver.

He passed a group of huddled undesirables, fresh off one of the eastern trains, and felt a pang of sympathy—but only a pang. These were the same savages who for centuries had hunted and killed his species. So many stabbings; so much hatred. As a filthy boy reached for his overcoat, Preobrazhensky forced himself to see the child solely as blood-potential. _The younger, the better_ , Preobrazhensky reminded himself. _The revolution demands an iron will._

# \- - -

St. Petersburg's Winter Palace was cacophonous. A multitude of exhilarated voices speaking hurriedly and at once over a faint but violent backdrop of gunfire and explosions. Hopes and dreams mixed with practical realities and intra-party ideological disputes about some obscure aspect of vampirosocialism. Then Lenin, unfanged as was now the custom, called order for roll call. Goblets of blood circulated and one-by-one the names were read: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Stalin, Preobrazhensky...

The civil war was present too, but everyone agreed the Reds were winning, and it was time to formally announce the revolutionary state. After weeks of negotiations, the outline was clear. The vampires had reached agreement with the urban proletariat (small enough to be pummeled into obedience) and non-kulak peasantry (hungry and fearful) to enslave and liquidate the remaining classes.

The humans would be allowed autonomous republics, but to the vampires would go the cities and, through their dominance in the Party, the economy, foreign policy, army and police. The vampires would thereby control all internal and external state policies. Although they were a minority, they were an ancient, well-organized one, and every day their ranks swelled.

Foreign vampires crossed the border _en masse_ to join the Motherland of World Vampirism.

# \- - -

Preobrazhensky watched Lenin ascend the platform, reveal his fangs and address the gathering crowd. After he finished—

"Peace! Land! Blood!" they chanted.

The revolution had begun.


	41. Pretty Pink Confetti

I'll tell you everything I told the police.

I never liked my boss. He was a jerk and treated me like trash. For years I meekly took it. Something went wrong; he'd blame me. An advancement opportunity arose for which _I was perfectly qualified_ ; he'd recommend somebody else. He never greeted me in the mornings or asked about my weekend. He never remembered my birthday. He was cruel, and an expert at playing people against one another. Over the years, he played most of them against me. So, yes, I had every reason to hate him. And as my hatred reached its boiling point, I needed a release. In a sense you could even say I snapped, but it was _snapping by my standards_. I didn't want to go postal. All I wanted was to order a confetti bomb.

Because I'd never done anything like that, I didn't know the first thing about it. For example, I knew there were websites, but not which ones were good, or even which ones were legitimate, so I chose at random and settled on the one I did because the design was nice, the prices seemed reasonable and they accepted BTC. The ordering process was simple. All I had to do after typing in my email (a freshly created fake one) and selecting a target address was choose a confetti level: low, medium, high, or _beautiful pink_. Because I wanted to get him good, I chose the last option, imagining it would be the hardest to clean up after.

I paid, pressed submit, and that was it.

Three days later, I received a video in my inbox.

I played it.

It started off black but with sound. I heard a doorbell, my boss' voice asking if he had to sign for delivery, some faint knocking about, then a loud thud as if a box had been set down. Next I heard the un-blading of a utility knife and cardboard being cut.

**A deafening bang!**

As darkness faded away to colours and sunlight: a rain of multi-coloured confetti fell inside a ritzy-looking living room.

I saw my boss covered in confetti, brushing it from his hair and wiping it off his cheeks—but the look on his face wasn't one of surprise, or even shock. It was the look of horror!

I saw him feebly lift the utility knife and point it at the camera _as the camera moved toward him._

Music began playing as if from a music box, but it was the same short melody over and over, stuck in a loop, with a single raspy voice singing in whispers:

_… lovely pink confetti …_

_… lovely pink confetti …_

"Please, there's been a mistake," my boss pleaded. His hand holding the utility knife shook.

The camera moved closer.

As it did, a shadow fell upon the floor. A black, inhuman shadow. Umbra without penumbra. Crawling forward. Crawling _onto_...

My boss' fear loomed ever greater, magnified with every passing second, every subsequent loop of that hideous music, until each crease on his face seemed etched permanently into his skin. Pale and unmoving, he looked like a grotesque statue of himself.

"Please," he whimpered.

"Sing."

_… lovely pink confetti …_

_… lovely pink confetti …_

He sliced at the camera with the utility knife—

A clawed hand caught his wrist.

"Sing."

"Lovely… pink confetti," he sang in a heartbeat staccato. "Lovely pink confe—"

The claws tightened, his wrist bled; he gasped! The utility knife dropped to the floor.

As a second set of claws swiped almost imperceptibly across the screen, opening four parallel wounds on his chest. Four red lines bleeding sickeningly downward.

He sobbed.

The shadow had climbed to his neck.

His choked, animal sounds were adding a perverse and terrible rhythm to the music.

_… lovely pink confetti …_

_… lovely pink confetti …_

The shadow enveloped him.

The claws carved.

His screams—

The video ended, leaving me in stunned silence. I had seen things online but never anything like this. This was a death video, a _murder video_. Worse: it was a murder video _with which I was directly involved_. I wiped an accumulation of sweat from my mouth and sat down to think about what to do next. It didn't take long. After a few deep breaths, I called the police and reported a murder. "I have video evidence," I said.

Within ten minutes, three police cruisers were out front. Lights flashed. The police searched my house, then two officers took me and my laptop down to the station, where I sat in an interrogation room and recounted what happened:

The same story I've now told you.

They asked several times for my boss' name and address, and presumably watched the video.

After several hours, one of the detectives returned to the interrogation room and told me I was free to go. "Whatever fucked up game you're playing, I don't get it and _I don't want to get it,_ " he said, then explained that my boss was alive and that the video showed him opening a confetti bomb, being mildly startled and starting to clean up.

"Impossible," I said. "I saw—"

"Go home."

They gave me back my laptop.

But when I opened it later that evening, the video was gone. I had played the video directly from my email account, to which I had purposefully stayed logged in, and now the entire message was gone.

When I checked the confetti bomb website, everything was the same except that the only confetti options were low, medium and high.

There was no _beautiful pink_.

Perhaps I would have even entertained the possibility I had somehow madly fantasized about my boss' gruesome death if not for two factors. First, the police had admitted the existence of a video (albeit not one showing murder) and now there was no video, so they must have deleted it. Second, when I went to work the next morning my boss was _not the same_.

I don't mean he'd been replaced by a different person. What I mean is he was no longer sarcastic, manipulative or really much of anything. He did discipline me with a week-long suspension for my _prank_ , but even that he delivered in a droning monotone devoid of emotion. Whereas before he would have stomped and thundered and subjected me to a campaign of ridicule and retaliation, now he did nothing. More: he _was_ nothing: an emotionless shell which moved, acted and spoke like an automaton.

Sometimes when he's sitting at his desk, staring bovinely at his computer screen, the light from the adjacent window hits just right and I can make out an atlas of tiny lines on his skin, as if someone—or some _thing_ —had cut him into pieces before stitching him back together again.

He greets me in the morning, remembers my birthday and I even got a promotion.

There is one more thing, however.

On a Saturday afternoon two months after the confetti bomb incident, there was a knock on my door. When I looked outside, I saw an unattended brown cardboard box. It was quite heavy, but I managed to pick it up and carry it inside. Given what had happened, I was hesitant to open it, but curiosity eventually got the better of me, and when I managed to get it open—

**A deafening bang!**

Followed by a shower of beautiful pink confetti.

_Fleshy, bloody strips of confetti._

Raining down upon my body and upon the entirety of my home.

_Confetti sliding down the window panes._

_Confetti clogging up the drains._

_Confetti gathering in sloppy puddles on the floor._

_Confetti made of gore._

It took me days to clean up, and in truth there's likely still confetti in the deepest cracks and darkest corners, but there was something else in the cardboard box: a sheet of paper emblazoned with the confetti bomb website logo, thanking me for my purchase of their _soul-shredding_ service and offering three coupon codes for future soul-shredding redeemable by me or anyone—at 33.4% off the regular price.


	42. The day Isaiah Lassiter fell into Hamilton Street and everything after

Neepawa was of interest to no one but its few thousand inhabitants before the Creole, Isaiah Lassiter, fell into Hamilton Street.

Afterwards a few tabloid reporters came.

A podcaster showed up.

I was one of the witnesses to his fate, standing on the corner by the municipal library when Isaiah Lassiter came out of the bank, looked both ways and took a long step into the street.

His boot, however, did not find the firmness of asphalt—but sank right into it.

Indeed his whole leg soon disappeared. Then he lost his balance and fell forward, flapping his arms, yelling, before face forward he went and was no more.

I saw a man go overboard a fishing trawler once and it was like that.

Maybe thirty seconds went by and there were his arms, above the surface of the asphalt, waving and splashing like a drowning man's.

The few of us present wanted to help him, but nobody wanted to get too close on account of the weirdness, and Isaiah Lassiter couldn't swim, so he drowned, if that's the right word for it, though why wouldn't it be.

Soon after, the cars parked on the side of the street fell into the asphalt too.

The police came and taped off the street, and for a time the weirdness was confined to Hamilton Street, but eventually people started noticing it in avenues, parking lots and driveways, then it expanded to other streets, until most of the town's asphalt was liquid, and some Toronto newspaper called Neepawa the Venice of the prairies.

Scientists came.

Tourists and adventurers came.

No one could explain it, but someone must have been daring enough to try taking a dip because somehow we found out it was OK to get in and you could go swimming in it, up and down the streets, through the dark, warm liquid so much like denser water.

People splashed, soaked and went boating.

It was a few months after that, at the end of summer, when the killing happened. Some families were in the asphalt in Tupper Avenue near the park when the shark came, looking like asphalt too but having the fin, which cut the road lengthwise before leaping with its black jaws open and swallowing the Peters boy whole.

I can't describe the chaos that followed.

Maybe half the people got out.

The rest died in the asphalt and we never saw them again.

Nobody went into the asphalt after that, except a few divers lowered in a shark cage trying to measure the depth of Hamilton Street, but we never saw them again either.

There are more sharks now, and things with tentacles and sometimes a wind blows making waves only on the asphalt, and it keeps expanding. There's liquid cement and liquid wood, and Mary Cheevers said she saw a grove of liquid trees.

What if tomorrow we wake up as bodies of liquid self, able to swim in one another—

What monsters will find us then?


	43. Miles

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.

It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."

When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.

What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.

"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."

Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.

Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.

He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it _was_ a human hand!

Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.

Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.

By now I had to ask: "What is—"

"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."

I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several _pieces_ of human furniture.

"So they're working off their debts."

Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female _coffee table_ , who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.

"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"

By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—

"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let _them_ hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"

He chuckled. "See, even _your_ natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"

I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.

By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.

"Just down the hall," Miles said.

I stepped with dread.

The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.

Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands. 

"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.

No response.

"Do you need help?"

_Silence._

I shut off the water faucet, turned—

And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.

Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.

I nodded.

"They don't need saving."

He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."

The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.

I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"

His grip was firm.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."

"How long do they _work_ for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.

"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."

He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."

I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.

I got on the bed.

Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.

"Like it?"

"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."

For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.

"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.

I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—

It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.

The person inside was a man.

I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.

"Nice, right?" Miles asked.

"Yes."

"You can get up now."

I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—

The gym lights flashed cold and bright.

I squinted.

Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.

Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."

When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.

"Give it a shot," he said.

I stood frozen in place. _I knew there was someone in there._

"I can't d—"

"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."

"It's a _person_ ," I said, my voice rising.

"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."

_Her._

"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.

"Yes," a muffled voice responded.

"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."

"Hit me _please_ ," the heavy bag mumbled.

I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.

"Come on, man."

It made me sick to my stomach.

But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.

"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."

I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:

"Hit me."

"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.

"Do it _please_ ," the bag begged.

I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, _because I was sure I'd felt bone_ , as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.

For a while: silence.

Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.

"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.

"Again _please_."

So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.

After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, _a woman_ , and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…

Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.

He unzipped the bag.

"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.

"Vaguely."

"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.

I did remember that.

"Who did you go with?" I asked.

Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.

I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, _No, it couldn't be_ , but it was: _she_ was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with _someone like you_?"

He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.

I was scared and I was ashamed.

"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."

He laughed.

There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something _true_ that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.

"I am the way the world is," he said.

Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.

I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.

On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, _I am the way the world is_ , and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.

_I am the way the world is._

He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.

In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—

That's when I understood.

I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.

Faces looked out.

 _Miles was right_ , and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.


	44. New York State of Mind

My grandmother died clutching her rosary, her beloved first edition of Pushkin's _Eugene Onegin_ and a photo of my grandfather, a handsome man whom I barely knew and who had preceded her to the grave by thirty years after working himself to death in a Brooklyn meat plant. 

She had not remarried.

If you listened to my grandmother speak about her life, which I alone within my family did, you understood she felt her years had been a succession of cruelly dashed hopes. Her parents had died when she was a girl. War had crippled her. Yet she had opposed leaving Russia to the last hour, and it had pained her daily to see my grandfather toil for the benefit of men who mocked and mistreated him.

In her final years, she considered it a neverending insult to have descendants as thoroughly Americanized as we.

But even I did not realize the bitterness and acidity she had accumulated. Although we knew she did not have friends or happiness in the United States, not even I could have imagined the power and depth of her hatred, or predicted its devastating consequences.

Although my grandmother had few possessions when she died, and there was consequently little interest in her will, she left to me what she had cherished most, her collection of rare books. It was there that I discovered a letter inscribed with my name, to be opened upon her death.

I did so immediately following the cremation. The letter contained the following instruction: "Scatter my ashes on Liberty Island."

This required a permit and I applied for one.

It was days later, while seated on a white ferry crossing calm inland waters, holding the urn containing her ashes, surrounded by tourists, that grief hit me hardest, and it was then I truly said goodbye.

After we landed, I recited a prayer, opened the urn and let the winds take her remains.

I closed my eyes.

And opened them to: tourists gathering around me, speaking, gasping, and pointing at the Statue of Liberty, around whose base my grandmother's ashes swirled, a dark buzzing cloud, rising and rising until the entire figure was cloaked—

A cloak which fell away like sand revealing:

_Emptiness._

The Statue of Liberty was gone.

Devoured by the ashes, which had grown in volume and were accelerating, circling the island like a runaway ribbon of death as we stood stunned with phones in outstretched hands, before condensing into a black sphere and shooting across the bay toward Manhattan.

The rest I remember from news footage and YouTube:

Ashes looming over downtown like a storm cloud; 

Descending like fog;

Consuming skyscrapers, vehicles, people—

until they were all emptiness and New York City itself was but a vacancy beneath a cosmic blanket. Then too that blanket fell, smothering whatever life remained and settling into an eerie wasteland, an earthen scar where nothing grows, the wind never blows, and my grandmother's ashes lie dormant in a gray and hateful peace.


	45. Superspecimen

[Truck engine]

Ready?

_Four hundred metres._

[Bump. Muffled: "dead zone… no surveillance…"]

_Please state your name._

[Truck slows]

Dr. Irving Haskell.

_You have approximately ten minutes, Dr. Haskell._

About my compensation—

_As discussed. Ten million dollars and safe passage to Beijing in exchange for your knowledge._

Where do I start?

_The beginning._

It started in Peru in 2003.

_You were involved from the beginning?_

Yes, I'd been involved in the initial planning since the 1990s, and I took over as overseer in 2001.

_Why Peru?_

Lack of government interference. Away from Chinese spies.

_Why didn't it start earlier?_

The tech wasn't there. We lacked the ability.

_Ability to do what?_

Brain transplants.

_Tell me about the site in Peru._

It was an orphanage joined to a hospital for the mentally deficient.

_Children?_

Partly.

_What did you hope to accomplish?_

We were afraid we were falling behind in science—in intelligence, and we hoped to close the gap by accelerating the education of a select few... superspecimen.

_Explain the process._

It was based on the Russian doping programs and Chinese sports camps, but instead of isolating gifted children and specializing them in gymnastics, we wanted to specialize them in mathematics, physics, chemistry.

_You mentioned brain transplants._

Yes, that was the breakthrough. Because even the most gifted mind takes time to learn. We invented a bypass. By extracting one child's brain and implanting it successively in what we called learners—

_Did the children die?_

The donors, yes. Unfortunately.

_What were the learners?_

People. Mental deficients whose heads we'd hollowed out and whose bodies we'd re-engineered into biological learning machines. One for each subject, and the donor brains completed the cycle, transplanted into each learner in turn.

[Sigh]

I'll never forget the learning chamber, those docile bodies sitting and learning the same thing over and over. Barely resting, barely eating...

_Then?_

The brains were rehomed.

_Into superspecimen?_

Yes, children the same age as those from whom we'd harvested the brains. You can appreciate the elegance. Learning untangled from time. Education in the blink of an eye.

_Did it work?_

Oh, yes.

_How did you choose between donors and superspecimen?_

At random.

_But one died and the other survived._

That's a matter of perspective. The donor's body died, but its brain actually thrived in the superspeciman's body.

_Did you know their names?_

Always.

[Truck engine cuts]

What's the—

_Mateo Garcia. Angel Rodriguez. Hugo Echeveria. Alvaro Fonseca. Pablo Jimenez._

[Breathing]

_Javier Lopez. Manuel Perez. Rodrigo Morales. I can go on._

Those were all learners.

[Breathing]

Who… are you?

_I am all of them. Or they are me._

Impossible.

_I didn't just learn the foundations of science, Dr. Haskell. I learned my-selves. I became twenty-seven of them. Imagine what it feels like to be twenty-seven people's desire for revenge._

You're mad. The learners were eliminated when the program was shut down—

_It was never shut down._

In 2017.

_You were removed as overseer._

I...

_Until next time, Doctor._

[Gunshot]

[Muffled: "...prepare for extraction…"]

[End of recording]


	46. One Love, One Heart

"I wish it would have been different," the girl says, pressing the barrel of her gun against the boy's head.

"Me too," he replies, tightening his already white-knuckle grip on the knife held against her throat.

The sounds of children playing waft in through the open living room window, but inside the air is hot and still.

"Please"—Their mother speaks in choked, single words. "Put…"

The sentence dissipates.

Aborted.

The distraught woman's husband meekly comforts her.

"It's _my_ heart," the boy asserts.

His blade is sharp.

His sister presses the barrel of her gun harder against his head.

"It's _mine_ ," she replies.

"You share a heart," the husband says quietly. "You share a life."

As his wife weeps once more at the sight of her beloved children willing to kill each other for a better chance of individual survival: _siamese twins locked in a stand-off for the muscle beating within their single chest._

"Together we can't survive," the boy says.

"Not for long," the girl says.

She knows she has the advantage. Her bullet will end her brother's life whereas his knife will bleed them both, but that advantage seems moot if she ends up dead anyway.

Their mother lifts her head. Raw, pink eyes staring vacantly ahead—

"Please..."

"No," the girl says.

"Flip the coin," says the boy. "Heads, I die. Tails, she does."

Their mother collapses.

_Sobbing._

Her husband flips through his wallet. Stiff, shaking fingers. "For the love of God, this can't be the only way."

"It is," the boy says.

"The doctors said we can't both survive," the girl says, imagining how much easier this would have been if she had fired immediately. If her hand had obeyed her mind. If her brother had not grabbed the knife. "This way you don't have to choose."

The husband holds up a coin.

Children play outside.

_Normal children. Simple lives. Happiness. Sunshine._

The woman takes the coin from her husband.

Crawls forward.

"Let me do it," she croaks.

The boy relaxes his grip on the knife slightly. The girl feels for the first time the true weight of the gun.

The woman flips the coin.

And they all watch it rotate in the air: the spinning of fate, the revolution of—

**Bang!**

The boy's head explodes.

The woman screams.

The girl throws up all over herself.

The knife hits the floor—followed by the coin:

_Tails._

Before the man can grab her by the shoulders, the woman leaps forward, and in one impossibly fluid motion picks up the knife and drives it into her daughter's chest.

Three times.

Her husband barely manages to drag her away from the now-crumpled and one-headed, bloodied body. How beautiful their life once seemed.

"The coin," she screams. "The coin decided!"

The girl's eyelids flicker with a final passing of consciousness.

Outside: sudden silence.

Everyone must have heard the gunshot.

_Distant sirens sound._

The woman's voice drops to a murmur. "You killed my boy," she says. "My beautiful baby boy…"


	47. On Possum Lake

Night enveloped the empty mall parking lot, and under the hazy light of the waxing moon John Paulson unlocked one of the building's back doors.

Once inside—his manager's key eliciting the satisfying _click_ —he walked swiftly to the department store changing rooms, from which he retrieved several memory cards, and the women's washroom, from the toilets of which he retrieved several more. Each had been pulled from a hidden camera.

Security room: he erased all evidence of his visit.

The night air caressed him.

Although he'd planned to drive home before viewing this week's footage, his excitement caused him to pull over, and he jerked off on the unpaved shoulder to the flickering images of women undressing, posing, peeing…

At home, he downloaded the footage from each memory card, scanned through it and edited the good parts into an hour-long video, which he uploaded to his subscription site.

What had started as a hobby had become a successful side hustle.

Successful enough to take that trip he'd dreamed about: to Possum Lake, where his parents had taken him so many times as a child.

But never in winter.

Never when the lake had frozen over and become a black mirror, majestically reflecting the silence and the moonlit—

The crunch of snow beneath his boots echoed amongst the bare trunks.

His breath mistified the impending dark.

From somewhere deep within the uninhabited woodland, an animal scurried from branch to broken branch.

Possum Lake lay ahead.

Snow fell.

John Paulson laid down his backpack.

He'd found his spot.

He worked quickly: erecting his tent, heating food, and—as outside night descended upon the blizzarding world—climbing into his ultra-warm sleeping bag, from which memories and sleep took him swiftly.

He woke suddenly—

Naked.

Underfoot: cold, hard; ankle-deep in snow.

_Ice._

The moon was gone.

Yet he knew he was on the lake— _in the middle of it_ —and as his eyes adjusted he realized the lake itself was glowing.

More: _moaning_.

Light and sound emanating from underneath, filtered through the accumulation of snow.

He dropped to his knees, dug with his hands—

A face stared back.

Female and distorted by the frozen surface of the lake.

He fell.

Scurrying in reverse.

Plowing through the snow.

Revealing:

More warped female faces.

The air thickened.

He knew the faces, all of them—vaguely in some recess of his mind.

They're drowning, he thought, and began pounding on the ice, which cracked, thick lines spidering across its mammoth surface.

_Faces flowing underwater._

He pounded until he could not breathe.

Until the world—

inverted.

And he realized, choking, he was in the freezing water, flailing, lungs filling; drowning, as the faces moaned above.

He pounded on the underside of the ice.

Seeking a way out.

None was.

Each time he broke the ice with bleeding fists, swimming for salvation, their hands pushed him in. The surface froze over.

So it was: drowning without dying, suffering without end. 

Always under gaze of those eyes.

Always and—

Forever.


End file.
